Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

4 O viedo | C ampoamor T heatre | 22 nd O ctober 2004 We are witnessing the astounding, liberating transformation of an era, of the world, of reality, perhaps of man himself. We are perched on the rim of a volcano, and from all around there comes the thunder of war, of a war that first ravages one part of the globe and then involves the world as a whole, like a cancerous metastasis. As I am fromTrieste, I come from Italy, but also from a small part of that Central European civilization, Mitteleuropa, that before its time intuited, lived, and staged an upheaval comparable in history only with the demise of the world of antiquity. We live in a reality like the one described and foreseen by Musil; a reality floating on air with no foundations, made up of many copies of originals that have been lost or may never have existed, where events seem to be Parallel Actions similar to others that nevertheless do not happen, where a person feels as if he were multiple centrifuged beings, as if he were a scattering of islands rather than a single, compact whole. We have entered the control room of life’s factory, where we do not know if our great-grandchildren will be like us, how much they will be like us, whether they will share our passions or whether they will be almost another species. Reality is a theatre set that is constantly taken down, and we move across it like Don Quixote through La Mancha. We have created no Don Quixote , at most an Amadis of Gaul , and our old costumes wardrobe collects dust and gets even older and worse in this universal translocation that is taking place; yet this also plays its part in the shaping of a reality that is difficult to imagine. In its present and future —which is already partly our present, but is also still partly the future for us— Nietzsche and Dostoyevky foresaw the universal advent of nihilism. Much will depend on whether, like Nietzche, we experience it as a liberation to be celebrated, or whether, like Dostoyevky, as an illness to be cured of. Claudio Magris — Prince of Asturias Award for Literature 2004 Excerpt from the speech given on the occasion of receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature on 22/10/2004.