A literary critic who is, nevertheless, a good friend of mine, arrived at a meeting with me with a book under his arm. It was the recently published correspondence of a writer with one of his best friends. Decades of correspondence collected in a thick volume that invited one to dream even when seen from afar. I asked him about the work and he said it was very gossipy and full of details and reflections, but there was something that bothered him a lot: “He doesn’t ask his friend even once how he is doing,” he told me. “He never shows the slightest interest in the correspondent. He only writes to ask him for favors, to complain, and to tell him that he is writing the best novel of the last millennia. He never misses a beat.” how’s it going not even by mistake.”
We put forward two hypotheses: either the writer did not care about being seen as a cretin or he was not even aware of being a cretin, which is strange in an author who is otherwise perceptive and penetrating, even with himself. Since I do not believe that there are more egomaniacs in my profession than in that of ophthalmologists or property registrars, I suspect that he simply does not know that he is a cretin because no one has told him that those letters are typical of a cretin. And no one is going to tell him because being a cretin is no longer frowned upon, it is natural.
The song of summer, Wild filly, It is an affirmation of cretinism on a par with that epistolary: a self-portrait of the narrator as an indomitable, free and wonderful woman who praises and applauds herself without shame. Popular song has changed the tú for the yo in a very short time, bridging the gap between the “I love you with the strength from the seas” to the motomami spiteful by Rosalia. Even in contempt, the one who despises matters more than the one who is despised. The feelings promoted by the discotheque speakers have gone from I love you to the I love me to adapt to the times of Snow White mirror screens.
How can it be noticed that someone doesn’t ask his friend how he is if we live surrounded by people who only tell us how they are and don’t give a damn about how others are? My friend the critic and I are anachronistic types who, in our interest in other people’s lives, can seem like impertinent gossips. Two boring old men determined to converse in a world of monologues that never cross paths. By the way, that correspondence is missing the letters from the friend. His one-way egomania is modern even in that.
