Ondřej Šmída's Key Ideas from Changing My Mind
by Julian Barnes

We need to forget what we believed before, or at least forget with what passion and certainty we believed it, because we now believe something different that we know to be truer and deeper. Memory, or the weakening or lack of it, helps endorse our new position; it is part of the process.

Some people, as they get older, become more conservative; over the years, among my friends and acquaintances, I’ve sometimes heard the familiar soft-shoe shuffle to the right. Those idealistic principles they had in their twenties have been rubbed away by exposure to the realities of life. Or, they’ve now got more money and want to protect it, and hand it on. Or, they start hating young people’s principles because they are remarkably similar to the ones they had in their own youth, now foolish delusions. Or, they simply don’t want any more change in their lives, thank you very much.

 If reading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of youth, rereading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of age. You know more, understand life better, and have the additional interest of checking your younger self against your older self.

I don’t think you are a more intelligent reader at sixty-five than at twenty-five; just a more subtle one.

There is a rarer changing of the mind: when a writer to whom you had previously been indifferent, indeed almost despised, suddenly makes sense to you, and you realize, with, yes, a kind of joy, that at last you have seen the point of them.

I am struck less by the frank admission of ways in which I have changed my mind, as by an underlying resistance to admitting that I have done so. I think this is a common trait. We may admit to 2 or 3 major shifts in our lifetime – which we would have to be blind not to see – but on the whole prefer to believe that we are consistent human beings rather than seaweed tossed around by the tides. We believe – we have to believe, otherwise we would be lost – in the integrity of the personality; also in the continuity of our lives making narrative sense. We don’t like to think we have lost the plot.