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– Algimantas, I read your book. It turned out to me that he does not spare his readers good advice. What ties your ideas together in the book?
– The author must be with his generation. Not just to live close, but to be part of it. For this to happen, one important thing is necessary: the writer must have stories that are worth telling. People value the real things and the stories they can recognize. After all, Homer also spoke of the raging bandits between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea who hijacked the passing ships. To make it more interesting, the writer turned his hero into gods and demigods, although those who read his verses clearly knew what he was talking about.
Cervantes also began his Don Quixote as a parody of selected novels of the time, but when he got engaged, he told it all as a true story. Literature will be read and loved if it reflects real life. People yearn for the truth. Especially people from my generation who have been mutilated for many years. They were taken down by everyone from school to government to magazine and newspaper publishers. Now they can draw their own conclusions, but they need knowledge to do so. I am looking for them myself and, having found something infinitely interesting, I want to share it with the readers.
Personal album photo album / Algimantas Čekuolis
– How would you describe your generation?
– We – a generation that has seen a lot. After all, my contemporaries and I remember the times of Smetona, the first Bolshevik year, we remember the German occupation, then the second Bolshevik year, and independent Lithuania. We have been broken many times, but now we are trying to stay on our undersized legs.
– You, like all of us, are in a strange moment today. How do you survive it?
– Silent. It is silly to object that spring is coming or that the storm is slowing down.
– In your book, I have read many perspectives for the future. How do you envision the future of Lithuania?
– Not bad. Unless, of course, we choose the right direction. We have to move not in industry, not even in science, we have to take it seriously in agriculture. We must modernize the old tradition of our land. Gone are the days when seventeen cereals grew from a single grain, today farmers grow fifty-hundred. If Lithuanian farmers use computer technologies and electronic means, our agriculture will rise to the heights.
I have no doubt about it. We have a big hit ahead of us, because a programmed tractor works much more efficiently without a person. If the technological revolution in agriculture does not occur, the darkest prophecies will come true and the Lithuanian nation will disappear, melting like a lump of sugar on a window sill on a hot day. To defeat ourselves, see gains, exploit our brutal love for our country, we, as writers, must help people see the perspective. And not insistently, not from a textbook to show it, but through the good experiences of other countries.
– You have not sown without the current news – Covid-19 issues? Couldn’t you stay away? How do you self-quarantine?
– Can I brag? The Czech has a very strong instinct that resists both women and history. No matter how many loops I was building, I managed to escape them. In 2008, I came across a story in the foreign press about a gathering of young scientists who were already anticipating major riots in America in the fall of 2020.
There are not many dead, as they prophesied, but the year is not over and Trump has not yet shown all the nails. History tells us that no giant nation, no empire, lives long. Let’s remember the United Kingdom or France, Holland and, now, strawberry Russia. The United States, with its democracy, seems to have done well, but today I am not sure that they will collapse.
– Perhaps a global pandemic could have been foreseen? Have you not read those ideas anywhere?
– I am sure that both you and I carry many viruses in and on the surface of my body. If the body is weak, we will probably get sick, if we are strong, it may overtake us. I don’t mean just the crown, I mean tuberculosis. A strong immune system pushes viruses into a corner and prevents them from appearing. That is not what I am talking about, that is what the scientists of the world are talking about: I have translated a lot of literature to my knowledge. I continue to thank God for giving me the opportunity and desire to learn foreign languages that allow me to delve into some or even a few dozen theories, not just one.
– And how do you spend your days in quarantine?
– Oh, very good, I write books.
Personal Album Photo Album / “Northern Lights for a Newborn”
– I read in your book: your health depends on how much you sleep. What is your agenda?
– You have to have your own time to sleep. It is better if it is one and the same. I always go to bed after the last word from Panorama. And I don’t care what happens next, if need be, every time I turn around and look. In the morning, I usually travel between six and seven. I exercise, take a cold shower, breakfast, work, lunch, go to bed. I also have dinner at the same time, between the sixth and the seventh night. I bite lightly so that a full stomach doesn’t interfere with sleep.
Sometimes, before going to bed, I turn to the desk and see where I stopped. I will not hide, there is a temptation to continue working, but I tell myself – I do not need and put a pen on the table. I still write by hand, I write texts for myself on a computer, I dictate them myself. Sometimes I don’t understand what I wrote, that’s my letter … But let me remind you, I’m already 89 years old. Who else wants to see young girls?
– What things from your youth do you miss the most?
– Speed. I walk with a cane, I lame, which deprives me of the opportunity to go out to the park, to cross the city. My face is recognized by many more on television, especially women who hold her hand, piercing with that compassionate gaze. That pity makes me vomit, I can’t stand it and I’m not leaving home. I have a long hallway in my apartment, fifteen steps there, fifteen back. I open the windows, imitate the fresh air, and walk like this several times a day.
He was not afraid of dying, he was a good age, he had beaten me since he was sixteen. Later I went to Moscow to study literature, it was the only way to prevent my parents from being deported to Siberia. My father was a marksman, my mother was a young Lithuanian leader, and they were both teachers. I had been sitting with the students in their classrooms for three years, my parents had nowhere to help me. Perhaps that is why I don’t even remember illiterate, and the habit of seeking knowledge that was formed at that time has survived to this day.
Personal album photo album / Algimantas Čekuolis
– In your book you write about loneliness, you equate it with hunger. You feel so?
– I’ve been sailing ships for twelve years. In them I met many ignorant, stubborn and primitive people. I felt much better being alone in my cabin than with them. I shut myself up and lived with my loneliness. And with dreams, of course. I always liked to dream, in my youth I even had to calm down: nothing good would come out of a dreamer. But dreams carry us forward. That must be taken into account.
– When your wife Edita died, you were left without a lifelong friend, how can you endure so much loneliness?
– After Edita’s death, I didn’t dare to help women. It always seemed to me that I was going to insult his memory. I like to stay in sanatoriums in Druskininkai or Birštonas, where it is full of lonely people, sit in a bar and chat over a glass of wine. I can’t say that I have experienced loneliness when you don’t know where to lie down. Maybe I no longer experience it. Who knows how much I have left here, look, in half a year the valleys will take off and close. Promise me that you won’t forgive me, you’d better envy me.
– Can I ask you to list the five things that seem most important to you in life?
– Well, let’s get started. The first is learning to look people in the eye. The second is knowing that life will never happen again. The third is a very loving woman. Fourth: eat and drink deliciously. There is nothing tastier than a large plate of vegetables that marti prepares for me. And the fifth is to have five layers of instincts and not to be confused with them.
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