Occasionally, but not often enough, I stumble across something very special. Scottish author Andrew O'Hagan's opening address to the Sydney Writers' Festival, titled "The Power of Literature: The News That Stays News," is special indeed!! In it, states Ramona Koval of the Book Show, O'Hagan "argues that words and imagination are our great protectors. And when you hear what he has to say, delivered in his sonorous Glasgow accent, you might also walk away convinced of the power of books."
You can listen to O'Hagan's address here, or read it here.
I have pasted a few snippets below:
I grew up in a town on the west coast of Scotland. We lived on a housing estate
outside Glasgow that looked into the waters of the Firth of Clyde. It was a colourful childhood informed by the regular heartaches, but to look at our houses you’d have thought we were the very height of optimistic fashion. Those housing schemes, as we called them, or Projects, as the Americans preferred, were the outcome of a certain kind of 1960s idealism in Britain. Those tower blocks were meant to bring us out of the dark slums and out of post-war austerity into a clear blue nirvana of fresh air and artificial godliness. Homes in the sky. That was our working-class inheritance: to be delivered brand new into the hands of the future, and there was always something space age about our 70s outlook.
But living close to the water gave us broader horizons. We looked out there and felt the dreadful load of those hopes at our backs – the very weight of that British idealism which seemed over-wrought and already failing. It would take several more years for us to find out that the housing experiment was a disaster, that our childhood filled with diggers and excavations and cement could not answer the problems of character and economy and history. That is something we could only do for ourselves, we’d find out, and no number of new airing cupboards or inside bathrooms could stand in for the revolution that was due to happen in our own consciences. The old Scottish patriotism, the old British arrogance, the industrial dominion, was over, and we were children stuck with our cow’s-licks and our dreams in a post-industrial landscape, where none of the old certainties could apply any more. We weren’t even a working class in the way our parents and grandparents had been, with dependable work and a culture of our own. The news in the Thatcher years showed us daily how all that was being ripped apart and how our immediate world was turning us into ghosts.
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It is not policy or tradition but the everyday work of the imagination that can make us see both the rarity and the responsibility of being truly alive. And literature is the accompaniment to that sense: not something you do in your spare time, but the beat of time itself, and we will feel that pulse in every major area we turn to. I put it you, ladies and gentleman: if we are truly alive, we have a duty to connect with the planet we inherited and that others will inherit in their turn. If we are truly alive, we have a role to
play – every one of us – in the realization of peace and tolerance in our time. If we are truly alive, and if we know what the imagination can do, it will not be in us to sit dormant whilst the planet is ruined by unfettered commerce or whilst thousands are killed by the pre-emptive and ruinous urges of Christian or Islamic fundamentalisms. If we are civilized, we imagine our way past political coercion or selfish pride. We speak truth to power. We question our media. We spring to the defense of liberty. We take care of the
world’s resources. We interrogate corporations and we upbraid ourselves and our hungers and our needs. We listen to the past. We question our feelings of superiority. We teach our children the truth of our culture and what it has done and what it has failed to do. We keep a close watch on this heart of mine – yours and your and yours. And we never forget that we are moral beings and not machines. This is what we do if we are truly alive. This is what we do if we live close to our imaginations. And how do we do that, how
do we keep company with our imaginations, what do we do to be so alive? It’s easy – we read books.
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Literature is not Lifestyle – it is Life. It is the news that stays news. For his demonstration of man’s intricate lust for power and war, Homer’s Iliad is the news that stays news. For his wild jokes at the expense of man’s seriousness, Rabelais is the news that stays news. For his insight into vanity, history and the state, Shakespeare is the news that stays news. For her intuition about the threat of industry and science, Mary’s Shelley’s
Frankenstein is the news that stays news. For his knowledge of character and his love of the human heart, James Boswell’s great biography is the news that stays news. For the scope of evolution and the nature of our genes, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is the news that stays news. For his sense that each man is more than one person, Robert Louis Stevenson is the news that stays news. For his feeling that illusion is a sad and romantic and persistent force in our lives, F. Scott Fitzgerald is the news that stays news. For the struggle of man in the face of the unknowable pressure of totalitarianism, the novels of Franz Kafka are the news that stays news. For her beautiful and expensive evocation of
the fragility of the human mind and its imaginings, the writings of Virginia Woolf are the news that stays news. For their sense of modern man in the face of the absurd, Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus are the news that stays news. For their bids for sexual freedom, Oscar Wilde and Tennessee Williams and Janet Frame are the news that stays news. For their love of argument and their vivid passion for the soul, Saul Bellow and Joseph Brodsky and Gunter Grass and David Malouf and Seamus Heaney are the news that stays news. . . . . That is what literature does – it not only makes experience survive, but it makes life itself survivable and most beautiful.
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