SELLING THE AURA

Back in old good Europe last summer, I have been about to realize, while walking in some subway's everlasting corridors that an era had just vanished. At first, I had looked at without truly being conscious and it is only a few days ago that the idea grew to be clear, that I have been able to go beyond what my eyes, nearly mesmerized, had captured.

The revelation became possible when a shock occurred: I thought I was browsing the online ad from whatever new (yet old) detective movie set in New York - but the trailer was actually advertising a book. And it is at this point that the huge wall-poster in the middle of which a writer (stupidly posing) advertised himself finally made sense. No wonder that the said novelist had managed turning all of his books into worldly translated successes, no wonder either that most of them had been or will be filmed, that was now a necessity, a must. I recall reading somewhere that this man's success was a marvel to critics, that they did not find anything special neither new nor breathtaking in his books. Yet, they were bought, yet he was loved by the crowd.

Definitely, Baudelaire's modernity had sunk for ever. Even writing was now part of the system; even books were goods to be sold, enjoyable light items to help people forgetting for good that they were not free. Today, writing is a business, to be precisely marketed, writers have to belong to the stardom which is paved with icons and photographs and movie pictures while words are used, disembodied, turned into the flesh of more and more and more images to be.