The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [53]
That kind of solitude is a victory for me, and I’ve been searching for it. Today, you are interviewing me in 1976. If you had interviewed me in ’74 or ’73 or ’65, I would probably have answered a little differently—but not too much. Like a photograph, an interview has to crystallize the moment in which it takes place. Today, I need that kind of solitude so much—since it is what moves me, intellectually speaking—that sometimes I feel the need to be physically alone. When I’m with my companion, there are moments when we are two too many. I never get bored when I’m alone, and I get easily bored when I’m with others. And women who, like Indira and like Golda, have had the guts to accept that solitude are the women who have achieved something.
You must also consider that, in terms of the kind of solitude we’ve been talking about, women like Golda and Indira are more representative because they are old. A person of my generation and, even more so, a woman younger than myself, really wants that solitude. Golda and Indira were victimized by it, since they belonged to a generation in which people didn’t think as we do today. They were probably hurt, and I don’t know how much they pitied themselves. Golda cried at a certain moment during the interview. When she spoke of her husband, she was regretting something.
As far as myself, in the past I felt less happy about this subject. It was still something to fight about inside myself, trying to understand it better. But today I’m completely free of it, the problem doesn’t exist anymore. And I don’t even gloat over the fact that what could have been considered a sacrifice yesterday is today an achievement. We must thank the feminists for this, because they’ve helped not only me but everybody, all women. And young people, both men and women, understand this very much.
Golda spoke of having lost the family as a great sacrifice—she was crying then. But to me, the worst curse that could happen to a person is to have a family.
That’s not a very Italian attitude, is it?
You’d be surprised. We know about marriage Italian-style. But people in Italy today are getting married less and less. We have an unbelievable tax law that makes two persons who are married and who both work pay more taxes than they would if they were single. So they get separated or divorced. And there’s nothing “romantic” or “Italian” about this. No, the family, at least morally and psychologically, is disappearing in Italy, as well as all over Europe.
What should exist in its place?
Free individuals.
But no community.
You ask me too much. If I could answer you I would have resolved the problem. If you said to me: “All right, socialism as it’s been applied until now hasn’t worked. Capitalism doesn’t work. What should we do?” I’d have to respond: “My dear, if I could answer these questions, I’d be the philosopher of my time.”
In the introduction to your interview with Golda Meir, you comment on the resemblances you noticed between Meir and your own mother, writing: “My mother too has the same gray curly hair, that tired and wrinkled face, that heavy body supported on swollen, unsteady, leaden legs. My mother too has that sweet and energetic look about her, the look of a housewife obsessed with cleanliness. They are a breed of women, you see, that has gone out of style and whose wealth consists in a disarming simplicity, an irritating modesty, a wisdom that comes from having toiled all their lives in the pain, discomfort and trouble that leave no time for the superfluous.”
And in the introduction to your interview with Henry Kissinger, you tell how you were immediately reminded of an old teacher of yours “who enjoyed frightening me by staring at me ironically from behind his spectacles. Kissinger even had the same baritone, or rather guttural,