A pleasurable nostalgia for time as it passes: this, perhaps, is the hallmark of encouraging books. An author who was endowed with this talent was Mario Soldati. Born in 1906, he was a journalist, a writer, a traveler, and a gourmet ante litteram. He died in 1999 at Tellaro near La Spezia, where he had lived for many years. When I first read Soldati, I immediately thought, This man is a distributor of joy.
Natalia Ginzburg came to the same conclusion:
Soldati alone among Italian writers of the twentieth century constantly and unfailingly delighted in expressing the joy of living. Not the pleasure of living, but the joy; the pleasure of living is that of the tourist who visits places around the world, savoring their delights and all they have to offer, but overlooking or recoiling from the foul, or sick, or cruel aspects; the joy of living recoils from nothing and no one: it contemplates the universe, explores it in all its misery, and absolves it.
There, perhaps that’s the key: a book changes your mood when it says the right thing at the appropriate moment, in a suitable tone. Mario Soldati possessed that key, and he used it to offer access to his world. A world where nature and the word console, where friends fill your life, where departures and arrivals are unforgettable, childhood is a treasure, and wine is a gift.
America First Love was published in 1935, when the author was twenty-nine. A small literary miracle, full of space, promise, and messages:
Certainly, thinking back to Perrero, Praly, and Ghigo, remembering the alpine intoxications of my adolescence, the afternoons stretched out on my belly on the arid, windy ridges, among the schist detritus, and the cobalt blue gentianella, and, far away, in the same glance, the green valleys striped with mountain torrents, the mountaintops of France, the glaciers of Pelvoux; that blazing sun, that violent, icy wind, that torpor, that happiness, the chiming bells of the flocks (little patches of white, still on the distant grassy hillsides), wandering lightly on the wind into the immensity of space, and at times shouts, the lost cries of shepherds, and long high-pitched songs of girls spreading out into the sun and the blue sky, I felt an absolute desire to go back there. But I still didn’t know that the only true sin is to ignore or forget that which can make us, each of us, happy.
For his whole life, hidden behind a mustache and a smile, that’s the way Mario Soldati was: caught between Piedmont—to which Liguria is the elegant briny fringe—and the world, which is why he has never ceased to surprise himself. A horizontal form of writing that never intimidates readers, but invites them to draw closer. And, once they are close enough, whispers to them: Let me teach you to look; this is how it’s done.
As in “Disco Rosso” (Red Disk), from La messa dei villeggianti (The Vacationers’ Mass, 1959). Italy is a spectacle; the railway is the self-propelled stage of a theater:
The train slows, awakening me. I raise the shade, look out, and recognize the Tuscan countryside, just beyond Arezzo. In the golden light of the late summer afternoon, fields, meadows, orchards, forests, roads, paths, farms, scattered houses, and villas rising high atop the hills, everything I see falls magically into order, of a supreme and heartbreaking beauty. . . .
A light breeze brushes over the grass on the edges of the tracks. Scattered, cheerful voices reach me from the train and from farther away, deeper in the countryside. I look at those gentle colors, all the greens of all those trees, the green of the olive trees, the green of the cypresses, the green of the oaks, the green of the chestnuts, and the green of the grass; the yellowish, reddish dirts; the white, pink, and gray houses; the sky, clear and a pale blue. I look out at that secret geometry, indecipherable and yet perceptible, whereby the entire landscape appears to have been constructed like the landscape in a canvas by a supremely great painter.
There can be no doubt: happiness, beauty, the meaning of life, are here before me. And just as I asked myself when I was young: what must I do to be worthy of this beauty, to touch this happiness, to understand what the meaning of life is? Likewise, I now ask myself, with the same anxiety: what have I done, in all these years, to be faithful to the memory of this moment?
More than a book, a pharmaceutical. To be taken before, during, or after a journey, as you prefer. Accompany it with a glass of chilled white wine, in memory of the author.
Writing
Ideas come when they choose. And aboard trains, it is my impression, they often choose to. Dino Buzzati—perhaps Italy’s greatest railway poet—was asked, “What is inspiration for you?” and he replied: “It is the idea, the exact idea.” A little later, in the same interview, he speaks of “a sort of flame that catches” and he attributes the creative process to “a stranger, a mysterious personage about whom I know very little.”
To that elusive individual goes all our admiration as readers in motion. Dino Buzzati understood that every journey is stimulating. Landscapes, faces, new situations, and unusual pairings produce original thoughts.
In this, Buzzati was a past master. The people he glimpsed as his train rolled by on the rails, inside those illuminated windows, can be found in his stories (“Qualcosa era successo,” or “Something Had Happened”) and in his paintings (Ragazza che precipita, or Falling Girl). Trains are among the protagonists of his Poema a fumetti (Poem Strip):
The direct trains the express trains the trains headed for eternity and death depart at fifteen past the 199th hour at two past the zero hour, but where do they go? They go. The rest is the secret of the second life, if there is one, there lies the mystery, the everlasting question. They leave for remote and unknowable destinations. The stationmaster sounds the blessed whistle, the locomotive starts up and puffs smoke, the windows are illuminated, the chefs on the international lines rush to and fro in a flurry of excitement, Toscanini is here, Marilyn is on board, Einstein has just arrived, not to mention Rene Magritte, hurry, hurry, we’re headed toward far-off places. Toward adventure. Toward . . . toward . . .
“You mean toward life?”
“No, no, sorry. All I mean is the steam, the smoke, the speed.”
All the author of The Tartar Steppe needed was a trolley—rails in the city—to depict Milan.
Aboard the trolley, looking around
he saw drawn grim dead faces
Musocco Inter money
the corrupt intellectual with his hair hanging down his back leaving the Bar Giamaica.
Look! The shutters the fines checking the clock
The metal shutter crashing down . . .
But none of us is Buzzati; and few enough, these days, show even traces of that sensibility. One fact remains. Travel in general—travel by train in particular—is a mental fertilizer: it helps ideas to sprout. But you have to tend them if you want them to grow. Imagination requires a certain method.
Here are ten things not to do, when the time comes to invent things.
1. Don’t Improvise
Inventing’s not the same thing as improvising. It means choosing among ideas. Some ideas are invited with meetings, encounters, images, readings, changes, and travel. Others arrive unlooked for, in the form of illuminations. Illuminations—moments of sudden, surprising clarity—should be taken seriously, the way they are in the comics (lightbulb!). Many will lead nowhere, and occasionally they can even prove embarrassing (“How could I ever have thought such a thing?”). Others, after causing an initial burst of enthusiasm, will turn out to be weak (being able to abandon them is a virtue). But others will bear fruit. Every great adventure of humanity began with a good idea, which someone was able to recognize.
2. Don’t Exclude
It’s necessary to foster mental associations and emotional contaminations. That is why the train—a form of social travel, in contrast with the automobile—helps us to think. Let’s say it again: traveling produces stimuli; it brings new experiences; it leads us to take risks—emotional, if no other kind. Without emotions, you execute; you don’t invent. If we exclude the new, all that remains i
s the old—and more or less, we already know that. Not excluding often means including. Let’s take the professions of journalist and writer. Nowadays our professional instincts can be put to the test, rapidly and gratuitously. From a tweet or a post that is widely liked and shared, an article can spring, and from the article an investigation, and from the investigation a column, and from the column a book, and in the end from the book, a television program or a play or a one-person show. The public is an excellent coauthor. Sometimes it’s ferocious, quite often too generous. But it’s never fraudulent.
3. Don’t Fool Yourself
Avoid overweening ambition and pride. Examine new ideas with a realistic eye, and ward off the interferences of passion: not everything we like is opportune, or necessarily within our reach. Creativity—like seduction and modern art, and unlike the tango, swimming, and billiards—allows us to bluff, even with ourselves. Writing, in particular, pushes us toward dangerous illusions that other professions don’t allow. Here, once again, is the importance of society—even the microcosm enclosed inside a moving train—and of social media. They’re an important test, a freezer to calm down unjustified bursts of heat. If no one gives any sign of being impressed with your stories, don’t you begin to wonder whether you might not know how to write? In order to take on new challenges, moreover, it’s wise to be convinced of what you’re doing: you need to learn how, and that takes time. Being adventurous is admirable; being conceited is annoying.
4. Don’t Get Sloppy
Avoid sloppiness, approximation, and excessive haste. You need to work gradually and with precision on your projects (there’s a difference between precision and nit-picking: nitpickers are pedantic; the precise are romantic). Make notes of your ideas, correct them, and improve them. Work on the details. Many creative projects, before they are completed, may appear confused. Instead they are excellent; all they need is some work. A patient imagination may seem, to some, like a contradiction in terms. However, it’s a virtue that brings results. The initial illumination is defined, refined, and polished. Every trip, in its way, is an odyssey. But before making it something that can be spelled with a capital letter, someone worked for a very long time on the Odyssey.
5. Don’t Be Afraid
Many of us, when visiting new places and doing different things, are afraid of scattering our energy and attention. The question that many ask themselves is this: does trying lots of things help or distract? Answer: it helps, as long as we are disciplined (see point 4). Every trip you take, every person you meet, and every new experience is a source of knowledge. Reality is creative by definition. But some of us prefer the pond of habit to the river of life (and then they complain about the toads).
6. Don’t Copy
Do original ideas exist? Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, ironically: “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” There’s some truth to that: knowledge is contamination and progress. We are the consequence of those who went before us. Life is borrowed and the world is borrowed. Not stolen, though. Imitation and inspiration lead to invention by being tuned in. A writer reads to find the right frequency. One phrase suggests other phrases; an image suggests other images; a place, other places. That’s normal. Those who write have to read; those who sing or play an instrument have to listen; those who paint have to look. Beware of cooks with no appetite.
7. Don’t Force Things
Original ideas, we’ve said, don’t come on command. And they don’t arrive if our brain is constantly occupied, like the bathrooms at the roadside grills on summer highways. Bain & Company, a consulting firm, has calculated the number of messages we each receive: a thousand a year in 1970, roughly thirty thousand today. Ideas have to find a breach in this forest of stimuli and information. The best moments? On trains, as this book suggests (and during travel in general, especially when we don’t have to drive, navigate, and decide). When you’re sleepy and during long meetings (the two things often seem to coincide). Showers, beaches, gyms. There’s no point in insisting on this point: there is no such thing as an automatic vending machine for ideas. They come willingly only when we’re not phoning, answering, posting, chatting. Adrenaline is STP for the engines of healthy people, but calm, pauses, and rest are indispensable. Invention is like sex: if you’re preoccupied, it doesn’t work.
8. Don’t Be Distracted
Robert M. Pirsig writes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.” Creative people don’t allow themselves to be distracted: their antennae are always functioning. They’re capable of drawing inspiration from anything. In every field, nowadays, what counts is the angle, the style, the packaging of a proposal. We journalists often forget this. We used to believe that being on a prestigious masthead was enough. When the Internet, the great disrupter, made much content easily accessible and free, certain products showed their limitations. If we’re not capable of adapting, it won’t be the end of the world, just the end of an industry. By now it ought to be clear: if you don’t supply value, you’re worthless. And if you’re worthless, you won’t survive.
9. Don’t Isolate Yourself
In order to create, you need to mix: talents and personalities, expertise and generations. Certain combinations—experience and enthusiasm, prudence and recklessness, caution and spontaneity—allow us to go far. A fifty-year-old and a twenty-year-old are natural allies: each possesses what the other lacks. Often the former contributes method, self-control, and the ability to synthesize; the latter, almost invariably, brings the gifts of energy, recklessness, and originality.
Steve Jobs believed in variety. He called biologists, mathematicians, writers, and a jurist (though not more than one!) to the working groups at Apple. In a New York Times op-ed piece, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google, explained the characteristics he’s looking for in new hires: “The No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. The second is leadership. When you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead? And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else?” In California, just as anywhere else, companies, nowadays, aren’t interested in knowing where, how, and what you studied. They want to know what you learned.
10. Don’t Become Rigid
Constrained creativity is an oxymoron, but organizations aren’t convinced. Peter Drucker—a guru of corporate management, born in Vienna in 1909, a naturalized American—once said: “So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.” A paradox that is as relevant as ever: the rigid division between inventors and implementers is a grotesque thing. In La chiave a stella (The Monkey’s Wrench, or The Wrench), Primo Levi describes, with intelligence and love, a phenomenon that many of us notice every day: the brilliance of manual labor. If publishers had the ability to analyze the elasticity and the precision of a carpenter or a farmer, books would be greatly improved.
* * *
Invention and organization aren’t incompatible. They are, in fact, complementary. “Power is nothing without control,” reads the headline of an ad campaign for tires. The same applies to the world of ideas. Method without imagination leads to boredom. Imagination without method leads to derailment. And such a thing can’t happen, not at the end of a book like this one.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This isn’t a travel book; it’s a book that travels. Some of the sections you’ve read here were conceived aboard trains, while the events were occurring; the landscapes were changing; the passengers were speaking. My first acknowledgment, then, goes to the various railways—Italian, German, European, American, Australian. Even Soviet railways, in the mid-1980s. They took me safe and sound to my destination
; they gave me plots, characters, opportunities, and emotions.
I’m a journalist: this is not a work of fiction; the stories I tell here really happened.
Each time, someone proved to be particularly important, and I want to give thanks here.
My first thank-you goes to my son, Antonio, who took his dad across America. As you’ve read, we left Washington, DC, and we arrived, overland, in Washington State in the summer of 2013. Traveling with a twenty-year-old son is an immense privilege. You’re awesome, kid.
My warmest thanks go to my wife. Ortensia put up with me from Moscow to Beijing (an uncomfortable but unforgettable honeymoon, in 1986) and from Helsinki to Istanbul in the summer of 1989, while Communism was crumbling (at last!) all around us. She proved to be an amazing traveler; she still is.
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