A day like today: William Golding

A story like this could happen at any time: a plane full of children suffered an accident, crashed on a lonely island in the middle of the ocean and all adults died. In this way the children found themselves alone, abandoned to their fate and strength. The oldest of them was barely 14 years old, and far from the family and civilization, without repressive surveillance norms, all the primitive forces were unleashed on the children. That island populated by children, which dragged the entire baggage of the city's culture, was the setting for children to deny another famous story, that of Robinson Crusoe. In Robinson Crusoe, a shipwrecked man arrived on a lonely island and dragged with him all culture and civilization, and ended up imposing them on the island. In this story, that of the children, although they also carried with them culture and civilization, it was the primary force of the wild place and instincts that eventually prevailed. Then the metamorphosis took place: that group of disciplined and angelic schoolchildren turned the experience into hell, and showed the demons that all humans carry inside. The author of this novel, which forces us to reflect on the nature of the human being, was William Golding, a British writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983. Golding, who was born on a day like today, September 19, 1911, in his acceptance speech said that "Humans produce violence like bees produce honey." His work is a call so that, without ignoring the instincts that identify us, with a lot of intelligence, we humans can ever taste the honeys of respect and coexistence.