Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
Born on 11 May 1904 in Figueres, in Catalonia, he died in the same town on 23 January 1989. He joined the Surrealist group in Paris in 1929, painted The Persistence of Memory in 1931, then drifted away from it in the late 1930s, André Breton having favoured him with the anagram “Avida Dollars”. In 1974 he opened his Theatre-Museum in Figueres.
Dalí is creative freedom carried to the point of impertinence: a moustache by way of manifesto, an eccentricity so methodical that it becomes a discipline. One may smile at the man; one cannot deny that he was, all his life, rigorously himself. That takes more courage than one might suppose.
“The one thing the world will never have enough of is exaggeration.”
« L'unique chose dont le monde n'aura jamais assez est l'exagération. »
“The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad!”
« L'unique différence entre un fou et moi, c'est que moi je ne suis pas fou. »
“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred character. Never try to correct them.”
« Les erreurs ont presque toujours un caractère sacré. N'essaie jamais de les corriger. »
“Do not bother about being modern. It is the one thing that, unfortunately, whatever you do, you cannot avoid being.”
« Ne t'occupe pas d'être moderne. C'est l'unique chose que malheureusement, quoi que tu fasses, tu ne pourras pas éviter d'être. »
Dino Buzzati (1906-1972)
Born on 16 October 1906 near Belluno, in the Veneto, he died in Milan on 28 January 1972: journalist at the Corriere della Sera, painter and writer. His masterpiece, The Tartar Steppe (Il deserto dei Tartari, 1940), follows Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo, posted to Fort Bastiani, who spends his life watching for an enemy that is to come out of the desert. The 1966 collection Il colombre (published in France as Le K) extends this muted brand of the fantastic, in which disquiet slips into everyday life without troubling to knock.
Buzzati is the poet of waiting and of time slipping away. He reminds us, with a cruel gentleness, that a life can be lost waiting for permission to begin. That is perhaps his highest lesson in liberty.
“Solitude grows the more people we know.”
« La solitudine si accresce quante più persone conosciamo. »
“In many things I am attached to the old things, to tradition, rather than to the things of tomorrow.”
« In molte cose io sono attaccato alle vecchie cose, alla tradizione, piuttosto che alle cose del domani. »
“Once again, the imagination of nature has proved greater and more cunning than the imagination of science.”
« Ancora una volta la fantasia della natura è stata più grande ed astuta che la fantasia della scienza. »
“Whoever has given so much to the mountain, whoever has risked his life for it so doggedly, will remain bound to that love for ever.”
« Chi ha dato tanto alla montagna, chi per la montagna ha rischiato con tanto accanimento la vita, a questo amore resterà legato per sempre. »
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
Born on 7 November 1913 in Mondovi, Algeria, he died on 4 January 1960 in a car accident at Villeblevin, in the Yonne. A journalist at Alger républicain and later at Combat, he published The Outsider and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Plague (1947) and The Rebel (1951), which brought about his quarrel with Sartre and the fellow travellers of communism. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1957.
Camus refused to choose between executioners; he preferred measure, the least applauded of the virtues and the most difficult. In The First Man, the unfinished novel found in his satchel at his death and published by Gallimard in 1994, Jacques Cormery seeks the trace of a father he never knew. He learns that in Morocco, as a young soldier, this father and a comrade came upon two sentries, atrociously mutilated. To the comrade, who saw in it the logic of war, the taciturn man replied with unexpected anger:
“No, a man restrains himself. That is what a man is, or else…”
« Non, un homme ça s'empêche. Voilà ce qu'est un homme, ou sinon… »
Liberty is not the absence of limits: it is the ability to set them for oneself. To be free is to be able to act, and to choose not to do what debases. Dignity begins where barbarity would find a thousand excuses.
Woody Allen (born 1935)
Born Allan Stewart Konigsberg on 1 December 1935 in Brooklyn, he was writing gags for others while still in his teens, took to the stage in the early 1960s, then moved behind the camera: Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Midnight in Paris (2011). Between films, he wrote pieces for The New Yorker, later collected in Getting Even (1971), Without Feathers (1975) and Side Effects (1980).
Allen puts the great questions of metaphysics to the universe, then frets about whether the restaurant will still be open. This is no frivolity: it is the politeness of despair, and the most elegant way of letting no ready-made answer be imposed upon one. He is known to have neither master nor catechism; only angst, the clarinet and Manhattan.
“Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.”
“Eternal nothingness is O.K. if you're dressed for it.”
“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
“To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.”