Where do my ideas come from and what happens if I change them?
BarcelonaI've often wondered where my ideas come from and what happens if I change them. I'm always open to doing so: give me a solid reason why, and I'll hesitate. Let me think about it for a while, and maybe I'll take your advice, or maybe I'll end up right back where I started. Over the years, I've realized that my way of understanding the world has deep roots, stemming from a thread of thought that predates me and will outlive me: tradition, history, and the language that verbalizes it all.
That's why I felt like reading Changing my mind,a short script by the British writer Julian Barnes published within the collection Ariadne's Thread From Ángulo Editorial. The work begins like this: "It seems simple enough. I've changed my mind." Subject, verb, object; a clear and simple action, without corrective or simplifying adjectives or adverbials. "No, I won't do it… I've changed my mind." I like that Alexandre Gombau, the translator, chose to translate Changing my mind by Changing my mindHe could also have said Changing my mind (in Spanish it has been translated as My changes of opinion), but the expression used by Gombau is nicer.
Throughout life, we change our minds more often than we realize. I have a few fixed ideas. They are surely the most essential: where I come from, what kind of life I would like to aspire to, what kind of world I believe is just. From there, everything else evolves and adapts to personal and contextual successes and failures. In the essay, Barnes highlights a quote from the Dadaist Francis Picabia: "We have round heads so that our thoughts can change direction."
When the emotional landscape changes
Julian Barnes's little book is divided into five sections: memories, words, politics, books, and age and time. The first, memories, strikes me as the most interesting. As the book progresses, it becomes more of a list of moments when the author has changed his mind or tastes. From the beginning, I'm interested in statements like this one (which contain his trademark touch of irony): "In any case, I have been convinced that I was right when I changed my mind. This is another characteristic of the process. We never think: 'Oh, I've changed my mind and now I've adopted a weaker, less similar point of view.' We always believe that changing one's mind is an improvement that leads to greater accuracy, or a greater sense of realism."
Old age, love, parenthood, the death of loved ones, contextual injustices, and many other situations reorient our lives. "Is it simply that the facts have changed?" the British author asks; "No, it is rather that previously unknown realms of facts and feelings have suddenly become clear, that the emotional landscape has shifted." The role of memory and the concept of self also emerge in this essay. Language enthusiasts will be interested in the chapter on words ("There was a golden age, a placid shelter, in which all words coexisted without meaning anything other than what they meant [...]. As soon as you can no longer trust that a word means what it 'has always meant', the world begins to turn."
The chapter on politics, given the world we live in, at a time when people are experiencing obvious ideological shifts, I think could be more interesting. I've only underlined this sentence: "Some people have firm convictions held with wavering; others have wavering convictions held with firmness." After all, Barnes isn't a politician, a sociologist, or an anthropologist; he's a writer, and reading him in essay form helps us understand him better, but above all, it provokes our own thoughts. And isn't that what writers do? Well, this is one of my fixed ideas, and frankly, if you don't like it, I don't have any other.