When you are honored in this way, with an award given by the Royal House In such impressive circumstances, your first thought is: “Do I deserve this?” But the moment that thought crosses your mind, you hear Prince Hamlet exclaim that if we all had what we deserved, who would escape the whipping?
The best thing then is not to insist on desert. Just be grateful, my wife says, and I am. Much obliged. Even so, awards are a reckoning with oneself. One can’t help but wonder: does all my work measure up? What were you trying to achieve all these years?
At this point, and since I am Isaiah Berlin’s biographer, I remember his distinction between a hedgehog and a fox: The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one important thing. Berlin used this gnomic fragment from an ancient Greek philosopher to make a distinction between two types of intellectual and artistic achievement. “There is,” he wrote, “a great chasm between those (…) who (…) relate everything to a single central vision (…) and (…) those who pursue many ends, often not related and even contradictory.
Today the Royal Family recognizes many types of achievements: artistic, cultural, scientific, sporting… Some of my fellow winners are hedgehogs and others are foxes. And surely there are great scientists who are hedgehogs. So, I ask myself, what am I? Anyone who has been an essayist, journalist, filmmaker, history teacher, biographer, human rights theorist, even – God forbid – politician, cannot be anything other than a fox.
But there is a third possibility: some foxes envy the hedgehog’s constant, single-minded tenacity, along with its ability to curl up into a ball and display its quills when confronted by those who attack it. I’m one of those foxes who always wanted to be a hedgehog. That is why it was very gratifying to hear the award jury say of me, I quote, that the mixture of “political realism, humanism and liberal idealism (…) are their fundamental concern.” This made me feel like a hedgehog, if only for a minute.
The truth is that, honestly, I cannot say that I have had a single fundamental concern. Creative work is like climbing in the dark. Most of the time you don’t know where you’re going. Sometimes you don’t even know why you’re doing it at all. It is only in a moment like this, when the clouds part and you find yourself at the top, that you begin to understand the path you have taken.
Looking back now, I would also like to confess how much I sometimes feared my fox’s freedom, how much most of us fear freedom, how difficult it is to maintain the sovereignty of our own judgment, to see the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. outside, how much, really, we must all fight to be free women and men in a world saturated with manipulation and lies. However, being able to say that we are free and truly deserve it is the prize that matters most in life.
Thank you, Your Highness, for this great honor. Today you made an old fox very happy.
#Michael #Ignatieff #Creative #work #climbing #dark