Actor and Audience

“The march toward old age, and let’s say it plainly, toward death, continues to provide unimaginable surprises, as if everything were an invention, a spectacle in which I am both actor and audience, and in which the scenes are characterised quite often by their parodic quality, like a laughable but also harsh theatrical illusion.”

Sergio Pitol, The Art of Flight

That line between actor and audience, self and spectacle, Pitol makes it feel less metaphor than daily reality. I read this while still young enough to feel distance from death, but old enough to glimpse its rehearsal in minor, accumulating absurdities. There’s something strangely steadying in Pitol’s tone: the harshness is there, but so is a kind of grim delight. That aging could be surreal rather than solemn, that its scenes unfold with parody as well as poignancy,  this defuses fear without denying gravity.

I marked the passage not for comfort, but for its lucidity. The theatre is not dignified. It is not tragic. It is lived, laughed at, and endured.