Werner Herzog - A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin by Paul Cronin

Author:Paul Cronin [Cronin, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780571259786
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

8

Reveries and Imagination

Do you still not own a cellphone?

I’m the only thinking person I know without one. I don’t want to be available at all times. Permanent connectivity isn’t my thing; I have always needed moments of quiet solitude for myself. There’s a Chinese poem from the Tang dynasty about someone describing a boat journey along the Yellow River and leaving his friend behind, a monk on a mountain, in the knowledge that they probably won’t see each other or have any contact for years. This man’s return, decades later, has an indescribable substance and depth. Compare this to standing in line at the airport, chatting on your cellphone to your loved one, who is waiting in the car park. There is too much shallow contact in our lives. I prefer to be face to face; I want the person I’m communicating with to be so close I can put my hand on their shoulder. Text messaging is the bastard child handed to us by the absence of reading.

It is my firm belief that solitude will increase in proportion to the new tools at our disposal, the explosive evolution of electronic and digital communication. Technology might remove us from our isolation, but we are entering an era of solitude. When you are caught in a snowdrift in South Dakota, fifty miles from the nearest town, your isolation can be overcome with a mere cellphone, but your solitude never will be. As for “social networks,” mine has forever been my kitchen table, where I cook for no more than four or five friends.

You use the Internet.

Of course. Who can avoid it? But I do so with hesitation. It has, after all, opened up a gigantic field of indiscretion, arrogance, narcissism and self-aggrandisement. Humility is scarce and mediocrity flows from every direction, with attention-seekers unleashing their innermost thoughts. I seem to be one of the few left who consider discretion a virtue, though we have to be cautious about such things because our sense of what is virtuous is forever shifting. A virtue can become obsolete – for example, chastity – and these days young men, their honour besmirched, would never challenge each other to a pistol duel. They would phone their attorneys instead. One time after Les Blank had been given a haircut he wasn’t happy with, I suggested he do what any American would: “Give your lawyer a call and sue.”

One morning in 1984 you left Sachrang, the village where you lived as a child, and proceeded to walk around the border of West and East Germany. Was this a political act?

Not explicitly. At the time, German reunification looked like a lost cause. The nation was in fragments, with no true centre, without a real metropolis or beating heart at its core. While the real capital city – Berlin – was a divided enclave deep in a separate country, we had to make do with Bonn, a provincial town, as our seat of government. It would be like having Ann Arbor, Michigan, as the capital of the United States.

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