A famous epigrammatic nugget of wisdom appears in The Leopard, Lampedusa’s great novel about a noble Sicilian family’s fortunes: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ I thought of the novel as I was driven up to Gstaad during last week’s heatwave. Disembarking in Geneva, I felt I was back in Nairobi, circa 1970, on my way to Mombasa and a romantic interlude among the elephants and wildebeest. The old continent now looks like Africa, especially in airports and public spaces. But things will have to change if we want things to stay the same, I told myself again and again.
In the coolness and quiet of the mountains one can think clearly about important things, such as ambition and lack of it, or the conundrum of whether one declines to try out of a false sense of decorum, or just plain laziness. Personal doubts aside, right now the great question seems to be the economic inequality generated by capitalism and free enterprise, and the egalitarian drive bursting out in anti-capitalist demonstrations and militant rage, as in London this week.
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