Thomas Fuller and "The Classical World": the final interview
Longer and longer stretches of silence overtook Fuller on the day of our final interview. News intruded--unexpected celebrity suicides, an upcoming summit meeting between two world powers, the French Open tennis tournament. He stared out of the window of his studio over and over, seemingly preoccupied. Twice he picked up one of the many books stacked in strange piles on the studio floor, examining the book cover as if he'd never seen it before...
Q: There's a passage in The Classical World when the hero has just arrived in Palermo and is walking from the port into the center of town and encounters a large group of Japanese tourists--I become aware of how deeply embedded the idea of change is in me...I actually still believe that to find myself, to understand who I am, I have to change, and change constantly. I wonder if that observation reflects the personal belief of its author?
A: O sure, of course. I'm obsessed with change, ever since I read Rilke as a young man. Rilke tattooed me: you must change your life, a phrase which has become something of a minor religion, a great piece of language that means almost nothing. Every so often now I pick up Rilke and am surprised by something I read there, though I think he's a writer who should have been made to read his own writing. The thing I was trying to say there in Palermo has something to do with the difference between what the travel industry calls "free independent travel" and "mass tourism." I deplore mass tourism as a concept, but can see how it might suit a certain type of person, a certain temperment. There are degrees of curiousity, and to condemn any one of them is to miss the point. A good writer is a free independent traveler but that's not to say he can't write for a mass tourist.
Q: The section of the book about Iceland has a different feel to it somehow. I'd say it feels wilder than the over-civilized south of Europe, would that be correct?
A: There are places in Iceland that you feel you're quite possibly the first person to walk over a stretch of countryside. The people are incredibly bright, and have a moral quality far more developed than in southern Europe. They actually punished the government officials, bankers, and lawyers who swindled them into the country's financial meltdown in 2008, naming them as they were--criminals!--and actually prosecuting them. In Iceland, they're not afraid of the dark.
Q: The relationship between the narrator/hero and his female companion, Jane, is often vexed to say the least?
A: Well, it's the male/female story of the ages, a celebration of essential differences, with the eventual realization that the female is the superior being. Jane is both innocent and worldly; our narrator's a furtive little spy who often acts as if his prefrontal cortex is still in the process of being formed. Jane always holds the moral upper-hand, and is a guide to our narrator without his knowing she's his guide. The feminine is such a sophisticated state of being! No wonder males have fought so long and so hard against it, otherwise they'd be overwhelmed, or at least they fear they would. There will only be real equality when both see the beauty in the other...
Q: Beauty is the book's big theme, correct? I read from The Classical World: The idea of beauty was born in the sudden sight of the ocean as seen through the branches of olive trees, I'm sure of it.
A: Yes, as are the questions of love, truth, justice, the classic questions. The question of beauty, the aesthetician's drama, is a question that once one starts rolling around in it, its constituent parts and its totality, if you will, never lets one go. What is beautiful? What constitutes beauty? Is there a reciprocal relationship between the lover and the beloved? And, if there is, what is the nature of it? Asking the question itself, what is beauty, opens up dimensions of personal identity, which then richocet into political, social, cultural realms. I came to think of the question as the wild card of all the essential questions, a piece of quicksilver that once it was identified slipped out of reach.
Q: There's a lot of walking in The Classical World. Is walking a preferred form of travel?
A: The world is meant to be walked, slowly, carrying no more than a small biodegrable backpack, with your hands free to pick up whatever interests you.
(Agrigento, Sicily, The Valley of the Temples). Everything's difficult in Agrigento, it's so hot every step takes something out of me, something I'll never get back. Shadows are impossible to find, only a few here and there left over from the glory days, made by the columns of the temples themselves; when I move toward them for shelter they've already disappeared. Lizards lick the dust off my feet, like they're testing to see if I qualify as ancient, then scurry away. From The Classical World by Thomas Fuller (IFSF, 2018)