My job at the publishing house didn’t last much longer, so I went back to writing for the regional newspaper. One Friday, they called me up at my parents’ house to ask if I could cover a conference given by a very popular philosopher that afternoon in the region’s capital. None of the usual reporters were available, so if I could go, it would be a huge favour. I was delighted to accept. That’s when the editor of the culture section’s weekend lift-out asked me to try to interview the philosopher for a lead article. At last, the moment had arrived when everyone would realise how clever I was. Of course, I told him, I’ll get you that interview. I got in touch with the conference organisers and they assured me that there’d be no problem. As long as it was brief, I could interview the philosopher before he gave his speech, because once that was over, he had to leave straight away for another engagement. I promised them it would be a brief interview, just the minimum I needed to put together the article.
A taxi deposited the philosopher in front of the cultural centre where he would be giving his speech fifteen minutes after the time he was supposed to have begun. Obviously, there was no way I’d be able to interview him. The auditorium was packed with people impatient to hear the philosopher’s advice. Although I was supposed to write a story on what he said, I was barely able to follow it. I was angry and bewildered. I felt completely incapable of telling the editor of the culture section that I had been unable to secure an interview with one of the most sought-after intellectuals in the region. During his conference, I think he advised his readers and admirers to be respectful towards others, to live together in harmony, and to want what you already have, because that way, you have what you want. He said we should apply the principles of the Enlightenment to our lives, enjoy sunny mornings and rainy afternoons: in short, we should be happy. How did my failure that afternoon fit in with his advice?
After what seemed like endless rounds of applause, his speech was finally over. I approached the conference organisers to see if I couldn’t get a couple of minutes with the philosopher. But it was impossible: he had to return immediately to the judges’ meeting for a very important philosophy prize. I managed to make my way over to him, but he just looked at me with his squinty eyes and said with forced friendliness that a taxi was already waiting for him. Without thinking, I suggested we could do the interview in the taxi, and that’s what happened.
This is the best anecdote I have from my time as a journalist, and it’s also the most daring I’ve ever been in a professional setting. I can’t recall the content of the interview, but I do remember that the taxi driver wanted to charge me for the return trip, after we had dropped the philosopher off at the famous restaurant where the other jury members were meeting. I didn’t pay him.
As an anecdote, it had a certain charm, and it caused the editor of the culture section to call me up and praise me for my quick thinking, and to insist that I include it at the start of the interview. I think I felt something like happiness when I saw it in print, in the middle pages of the weekend lift-out. At last, I had entered into the decisive phase of my life, where everyone would recognise my talent. I imagined myself sitting face to face with the editor, discussing philosophy and current trends in contemporary thought, about the need to appreciate what one has, as it’s the only way to ensure one has what one wants, about the need for ethical guidelines to make it possible for humans to live harmoniously together, and how that was the only way to fill the void left by postmodernism. I listened to the sound of my speech without noticing the words or the language in which I pronounced it, like the incomprehensible spiels delivered by characters in Charlie Chaplin films, after he finally allowed the use of sound.
A few days after the interview was published, I returned to the newspaper’s offices and went to over to greet the editor of the culture section. He was friendly, and he congratulated me on my work. We spoke superficially for a few minutes about the philosopher’s theories as shown by his responses in the interview. When we seemed to have run out of things to say on that topic, I told him that now that I’d started writing for the culture section, I wanted to keep doing so, and that he should assign me more projects. By the way he looked at me — a smile that couldn’t quite hide a feeling of awkward surprise — I realised I’d done the wrong thing. Maybe the door to the next successful phase of my professional life wasn’t open after all. ‘OK, propose some projects, pitch some articles, and I’ll take a look at them.’ He hadn’t even finished his sentence when a regular contributor to the culture section approached, a man I’d overheard discussing Schopenhauer on many occasions.
The editor introduced us. He told the regular contributor that I was the author of the interview with the philosopher that had been published in the latest edition. ‘Ah,’ was the only response from the contributor. When the editor asked him what he had thought of it, the contributor began a long speech that I found difficult to follow, and which reminded me a lot of my boss’s diatribes at the publishing company. From the Schopenhauer specialist’s sermon all I retained was that one should be very careful when writing down philosophers’ names, and that it’s essential to double-check facts before accepting them as true, and, needless to say, before publishing them.
End result: all the happiness and pride I felt at the publication of the interview quickly evaporated. So, when the editor of a different culture section — this time from the capital city of the region — called me a few days later, I was certain it was to chastise me for something I’d written in the interview. I was certain that I’d done something wrong and I’d grossly offended someone. But he spoke to me in a friendly manner and let me know that he’d heard how I managed to sneak into the philosopher’s taxi, and that he’d read my interview. He was interested in meeting me. As you can imagine, that’s when I heard the hinges squeak as the doors to success and recognition finally opened for me.
At our first meeting, the editor of the culture section at the newspaper in the region’s capital wanted to know about my education and work experience. I told him about the publishing house and the regional newspaper. Then he asked me lots of questions about the interview in the taxi. Once more I repeated my spiel about wanting what you have so you can have what you want, the ethical guidelines for harmonious relations between neighbours which will allow human beings to overcome the existential void and the certainty of civilisation’s doom. Obviously, he was evaluating my knowledge, so he wore a look of genuine interest, and I held forth with the self-assured manner of someone who is sure she has arrived at the highest planes of privilege, where a position has been waiting for her for some time.
He told me that over the past few months, several publishing houses had been putting out books of accessible philosophy. I didn’t want to think about what the Schopenhauer expert might have thought about my article on the popular philosopher, because I was already considering writing something that would inform potential readers about these new philosophy titles. The editor of the culture section at the regional capital’s newspaper seemed pleased, because he promised more assignments in the near future.
I ended up finding out what the Schopenhauer expert thought anyway, because one afternoon I bumped into him again at the offices of the regional newspaper. On that occasion, it was he who approached me at my workstation, and, without any preamble at all, he began talking to me about epigones — a word whose meaning was unknown to me at the time — and frivolous commercial projects. The only argument I could raise in my defence was that I was just trying to spread the word about newly published books, but that didn’t convince him. I heard the words epigone and frivolous all over again. When he left, I noticed that the editor of the culture section of the regional newspaper had a smug smile on his face.