In a shop window, I saw a Philips poster announcing the arrival of a new messiah, the TV set. Some predicted that this peculiar contraption was going to change our lives forever and turn us all into creatures of the future, like the Americans. Fermin Romero de Torres, always up to date on state-of-the-art technology, had already prophesied a grimmer outcome.
"Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own. Humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say - it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that."
- Excerpted from The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. The novel takes place in 1950's Barcelona.
It's a beautiful book! And a clever one.
Ruiz Zafón/listal.com
No comments:
Post a Comment