The only thing that saves us is friendship. By Vangelis Raptopoulos

Krystalia Patouli | www.tvxs.gr, 25-06-2012 With the arrest of Savvas Xiros and those others alleged to be members of the organisation, it is as if the cycle that began with the Metapolitefsi has come full circle.In the summer of 2002, there was a pervasive fear or numbness in the atmosphere, as if the prosecutions were about to become widespread and include anyone on the left, from the era of the anti-dictatorship struggle onwards.Or as if the ultimate aim of the prosecutions was to incriminate those I mentioned earlier. Both the Polytechnic generation and my own, that of the post-dictatorship era, began with collective visions only to end up trapped in the cocoon of individualism.And the days of the dismantling of 17 November were as if to remind us of exactly what we once were and what we have now become. It was like a final spasm of the collective as it faded away, a last flicker of it.That is why the whole atmosphere seemed appropriate for my narrative, which leads to the bitter realisation that the only collective thing left to us today is friendship. But perhaps there is an optimistic note here too.Because friendship could also act as a catalyst for whatever collective spirit emerges in the near future! Something like the old Philiki Etaireia! The only thing that saves us is friendship. One could put it that way. […] In my early books, from the 1980s, using the language of my time, I managed – by general admission – to capture certain collective characteristics of my generation. Later, I explored individualism and its labyrinth. They accused not only me, but my entire generation, of being obsessed with lifestyle, or perhaps of going along with it. But that was the 1990s: the era of lifestyle. It was something new to all of us, and as prose writers of that era, we explored it.After all, the politicisation of the post-dictatorship era had gone too far, the collective had become a parody, and when the constellation of individualism rose, it was clearly radical.With ‘Friends’, it’s as if I’m returning to the collective. There’s a trend of returning to politics; you can even see it in Hollywood films, it just hasn’t taken on mass proportions yet. It’s as if social consciousness is gradually returning.And within this context, from precisely this perspective, I discover friendship as a solution and a salvation, as resistance to the commodification of everything. However, we should not view friendship narrowly, merely as a relationship between teenagers, for example, but also between couples, children and parents. As a catalyst and a reason that will once again create a sense of community, something hopeful. [...] I observe today’s youngsters, the twenty-five-year-olds, and suddenly realise the confusion they are caught up in. Whilst they are a link in a chain, they delude themselves into thinking they are a new beginning, precisely because they have never experienced anything collective. My generation had the sense that something had come before it, and that something would follow.We were conscious of the historical baton relay. (Excerpt from Vangelis Raptopoulos’s book, The High Art of Failure, Ikaros Publications, 2012)