For days now, I've noticed the air is a little fresher at dusk. It's not yet autumn, but the light isn't the same. The colors are beginning to lose their summery violence and take on a kind of anticipated melancholy. I like this moment, although this year I can't help but feel a twinge of anguish. September has always been, for me, a month of beginnings and endings, a month in which life seems to take stock of what has happened and what might yet happen. But now, with the world as it is, every beginning seems threatened by a larger, more definitive end.
On television, the news is still the same, repeated with new words, as if it were news. Putin doesn't let go. Trump continues to make speeches that, in his opinion, will save the world, but which to me seem like the proclamations of a megalomaniac playing God. And Netanyahu, implacable, continues to make death his policy. Between the three of them, they seem like a kind of tragic heart, reciting the same old phrases about power, homeland, security. Nothing new, just more victims.
Meanwhile, here in Sant Feliu, the beach has emptied a little. The French vacationers have left, leaving in the bars a silence that isn't exactly silence: it's the sound of clinking glasses and the occasional radio still playing summer songs out of season. The neighbors are beginning to recognize us again, after months of unfamiliar faces. And I, like every September, have started organizing books. It's useless work, because I know that after two weeks I will have undone any imposed order. But I find a certain consolation: moving volumes up and down makes me think that, nevertheless, I can still make small gestures that still have an immediate and tangible result.
I think of a verse by Cavafy—which, as always, I can't quite remember—about those who live waiting for the barbarian to arrive, and when he finally arrives, they discover that their life was just that: waiting for him. Perhaps we are those citizens, except that the barbarian has been here for a while now, and sits with us every night at the table, through the screen.
And so it is this September, with one eye on the leaves beginning to fall and the other on the images that reach us from afar and that are harder to swallow every day. A month of transition, they say. But I don't know exactly where we're headed.
Well, that text that, dear reader, you just read, is a lie: I didn't write it. It was done by a machine that imitated my style (more or less). One August afternoon, this past August, on days of unbearable heat, a young and experienced friend of ours, along with a friend of ours, played, to pass the time, asking ChatGPT to write my September article. We only sent it my articles for July and August. In less than a minute, we had the September text written by the AI. I must say that I was completely stunned. How was it possible that a vile machine could read two of my texts and extract stylistic and thematic characteristics and produce another, entirely plausible, text? I couldn't believe it. The world has ended, I remember saying. Or, at the very least, literature has ended. What can we believe from now on? Who's to say that most newspapers aren't full of articles like mine? SeptemberHow many novel contests will be full of fake stories? And maybe there will be some good ones! Literature has ended, I said again in a low voice. And all so fast!
The thing is, the vile machine doesn't think. It wrote a supposition. But my will was unknown to it. Because it turns out that I, disgusted by everything that happens, this September didn't want to talk about the three fools who lead us to the most resounding failure, I didn't even want to talk about the leaves that are beginning to fall. Nor about the approaching autumn. The machine has surmised it. I simply wanted to talk about tomato jam.
For me, it's one of the best, along with sour orange and warm orange jam. In fact, we should call orange jam marmalade, like all other citrus jams. The rest are jams. Tomato jam is a bit tedious to make. You have to peel the tomatoes and wash them. Once prepared, they're chopped and weighed. Then the sugar is added. I use half the weight of the tomato. Or maybe even a little less. It's boiled slowly. When the juice thickens a little, it's ready.
I won't be doing this ChatGPT thing again. I'm sure. I promise.
