JAVIER MARIAS

INTERVIEWER:
How do you avoid taking yourself too seriously?


MARÍAS:
It’s not a matter of avoiding it. Either you have a feeling that you are important and that you are going to be remembered, or you do not. . . . There is a poem by Stevenson that I translated many years ago in which he calls writing “this childish task.” In the poem he addresses his ancestors, all of whom built lighthouses. He apologizes for not having followed the tradition and for staying at home and playing with paper like a child.

To think of posterity nowadays is ludicrous because things do not last. Books seem to last more than films or records but even they do not last very long. Now more than ever, we depend on the mercy of the living. When writers and filmmakers die there are three or five days during which, with any luck, the newspapers and the TV devote pages and programs. There is a big fuss, but then you have to wait ten years until there is a commemoration. The moment you are not here to defend your work in interviews, you literally do not exist. There is a penalty.