Harold Pinter: We Will Die Of Stupidity

Photograph by Cecil Beaton, 1962.

Interview with Harold Pinter

Conducted by James Grissom

Via Telephone

1997

Even if there is a mushroom cloud hovering above our corpses, we will be found to have died of stupidity. Even if we starve in fields or drop dead from chemical or gas leaks in our inferior homes, we will have died of stupidity.

We are dying of stupidity now.

You and I can find each other within a day via an e-mail, and within another day, we are on the phone talking about things. Time has taken on a new meaning and so, therefore, has life. If you and I, strangers, can meet and talk in so short a time, the logic of stupid minds immediately begins to wonder how quickly can fortunes be made, hidden, exploited? How quickly can land be purloined? How quickly can things be monetized, branded?

Life every day fails to hold any deep meaning. We are truly and totally merely subjects, consumers, at whom things are thrown to eat and smell and repeatedly buy. This gives our life an order that work and study once did, but those are now held in disregard, for where is there money to be had from the liberal arts or prayer or knowing anything that can't get a fast turnaround and an early retirement?

Prejudice keeps us feeling good about ourselves when our stupidity knocks at our consciousness. To not be black or female or Asian of Latin can make a lot of people feel good who can't think or enjoy the work of others who can and could.

Getting and spending, you know? We are transactions, constructions of commerce, wards of war, and we define ourselves as good citizens, patriotic, if we walk the carefully paved walkways to our destruction.

We have all shown up quickly knowing nothing, and we will all be dead soon of our stupidity, but happy in our final moments if we are white and assured, a little warm, with some bulging cupboards, and a pot on the boil.

©  2020  James Grissom