Archive of the Day

From The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester:

"What were the first signs of your brother's artistic interests, that you remember?"

"They tell me that there are certain specific moments which everybody in a generation can remember -- wars, sporting triumphs, unpopular assassinations, moon-landings. At the same time there are moments which are supposed to be commemorated in each individual's life: early sexual encounters, car accidents, bereavements; for a specific generation of people of a certain age, the first time one saw a color television. This brutal colonization of interior life has no interest for me nor, I suspect, for most true artists. I am more interested in the things I cannot remember, in absences, elisions, vacuities, negativities, voids, aporiae, nothingness. My own consciousness of my own artistic vocation came to me in one such moment, when I took a papier-mâché model my brother had made of an elephant, trunk erect and unconvincing mahout and all, and rode my tricycle backwards and forwards over it."