271. If God is distracted, if He isn’t listening, then we turn to His adversary. There is no invocation of the devil that fails to receive an attentive and interested hearing.
272. I’m afraid that it is the devil who imparts many of the lessons that lead us to know ourselves better.
273. Instead of trying to achieve fantasies and dreams, nowadays it would be advisable to take real facts and convert them into fantasies.
276. Living one’s life to satisfy the needs of another, to absorb their bad moods and malaises, to carry the train of their sickness, to earn a martyr’s crown in assisting them, while never making a point of it, never complaining, never demanding a thing in exchange for one’s mute sacrifice: well, deep down, I’m happy not to have a person like that at my side, so wonderful, so devoted, and instead to be allowed to kick the bucket in blessed peace.
279. That which is visible is also vulnerable.
280. Everything that is indispensable, from a certain point on, seems to have been lost forever: motherly love, for example, precious motherly love. We’ll spend the rest of our lives surrogating with other emotions the one emotion that can never be replaced, and the problem is that we do a passable job of it, going so far as to forget that indispensable sentiment entirely and thus, at the very instant we do so, sadly, becoming people who are no longer indispensable. The indispensable is what we regularly dispense with and then replace, substitute, surrogate, until what with all those replacements, there’s not so much as a gram of gold left in the statue, even if its divine and regal appearance remains unchanged, at least from a distance.
282. What makes the world turn is a gigantic compensation machine that works tirelessly.
283. Disaster is the consequence not of some wrong done, but of some joy experienced.
288. On special occasions, like those that I have been experiencing for the past couple of months, apparently the last or the penultimate moments of my life, reason becomes entirely independent of those who exercise it. And it begins to strike hard against its adversary, hard against even its allies, and last of all, even against itself. Delicacy by this point is a stranger to it.
290. I’m too busy regretting certain individual events from life to have time to regret life as a whole.
291. I was calm. But if someone comes along and tells me to calm down, then all of a sudden, I get worked up.
293. The crater on the edge of which the saints sit waiting is extinct now.
295. In the phases of a man’s life, there are migrations from one point of sexuality to another. Schopenhauer states that after age fifty, males generally turn homosexual, because the wisdom of Mother Nature wishes to prevent old men from getting women with child.
298. The Muses were savage at first. Then Apollo taught them everything. All education, even as it seems to eliminate it, only refines and empowers barbarity.
299. Some appreciate silence as the highest spiritual manifestation, placing it in opposition with the word understood as chatter. But there is nothing more menacing than silence. Garrulousness offends, but silence kills.
303. For an Italian, it was so natural to be a Catholic that, if an Italian wasn’t one, he was thereby rebelling against the very spirit of his blood. That is why atheists in this country are so angry and punctilious. Far easier to try to destroy the Catholic faith than to replace it. The problem with the project of overthrowing it is that, along with the Catholic faith, you have to sweep away all the rest; soon nothing is left standing of Italian culture, not even its most pugnacious opponents.
305. They explained to us how the world for quite some time now has been disenchanted and governed by reason. That wasn’t true. It isn’t true. The twentieth century was surely the least rational century in history, even less rational than the year 1000. Its movements were spasmodic. Its faiths, absurd. Its crimes: monstrous, unequaled. The only rational thing it had was the organization needed to commit them. Forget about Beowulf! Forget about Das Rheingold! Forget about flagellants and stylites and pillar saints! A society that wanted to present itself as rationally optimized on a scientific and economic basis was actually functioning like a crystal ball, a magic sphere of pure enchantment, and everyone was inside it, even the atheists, even the philosophers and the scientists, who had been turned back into sorcerers, all of them delighted at the chance. The twentieth century was a century of hypnosis and trance. How else can you explain the marches, the oceanic assemblies, the respectful silence of visitors when confronted by any old piece of crap in a museum, the rapture and tears with which great criminals were heard and venerated, the worshipful reception accorded megalomaniacal impostors, the idiotic smile of ambitious exterminators and the murderous smile of film divas . . . A century of sleepwalkers, of nightmares and evil spells and magicians.
306. Hatred in belief, and then resentment in the cessation of belief.
307. Effort always produces rancor: that is why some of the works of literature longest labored over and polished (e.g., those of Flaubert) seem to address the reader with a certain degree of spitefulness, as if scolding her or him for not sufficiently appreciating the sacrifices made to please her or him.
311. At times I have thought that I have attained, with respect to other people, say, my students, for example, a true and perfect goodness, and, in listening to them and advising them, an absolute objectivity. The fact that they have almost never paid any real attention to me in no way undermines this sensation, indeed, implicitly, it confirms it.
312. Lies are of no importance when both those who tell them and those who hear them know the truth.
314. We are convinced we love certain people and hate others: instead, most of the time we love and hate the same people.
317. Politics in and of itself is leftist, culture and religion in and of themselves are right-wing.
318. Since Mazzini’s time, every new political development in Italy originates outside the bounds of legality, so it makes perfect sense that subversive politics (first to establish fascism, then to overthrow it) would in time struggle to produce a leadership class.
319. Riches without men, and men without riches.
320. In the world of today, the possibility, nay the likelihood, practically the certainty of any given individual being at odds, in disagreement: so countless are the subjects, so infinite the number of variables in which that disagreement can surface. Even just the brand of cell phone you should buy, the best type of plan to choose. As choices increase, affinities diminish.
324. Life is a tortuous labyrinth, like the viscera concealed within the body.
325. Before dying, I’d like an explanation of just one thing. Anything at all.
326. I’ve noticed that at the recurrence of anniversaries of deaths, you no longer see headlines in the newspapers like, say, this one: “Ten Years Ago Lucio Battisti Died,” and instead we have “Ten Years Without Lucio.” As if to say: How have we managed without him, what sense have the past ten years even made, so empty now? After my own death, which will come soon enough, the small space that I have occupied will be filled immediately, just like a seat in a crowded streetcar (I’m reminded of those old trolleys, with shiny wooden interiors, that still circulate in Milan, slow, elegant . . .), where as soon as someone shows even the slightest intent of getting up to leave the trolley at the next stop, the passengers packed around them take advantage of the opportunity to spread out a little, relaxing with their elbows and bags and legs.
327. Knowing how to wait, accepting deferral, ought to be the adult way of facing up to things; demanding immediate gratification, instead, the childish way. The fury of the suckling infant who’s had the breast taken from him . . . Now I find myself in an utterly new condition in which I can’t tolerate deferral, and yet at the same time I demand it: I’d like anything, whether good or bad, to be pushed farther away, postponed ad infinitum.
328. Death comes no differently for those who whine and whimper and those who wait impassively (this is a paraphrase of a
line from Philip Larkin’s cynical poem “Aubade,” difficult to render in Italian because of the participial construction, so typical of the English language: “Death is no different whined at than withstood.” While it’s reasonably clear why Cosmo might have chosen to translate an excerpt from the poem, having read it recently, or else because it had suddenly come to mind, resurfacing in view of his own impending death, what still remains to be understood, in the final indifference between those two attitudes, is which of them he’d actually adopted, in which of them he recognized himself; or whether he simply alternated them, sometimes “whining,” at other times firmly withstanding the ordeal; or whether there might exist yet another possibility, a different approach that entails neither complaint nor virile acceptance; something I can’t quite picture to myself, but which perhaps Cosmo had discovered and adopted).
329. I don’t know how to conceive of the future. I don’t have the faintest idea of the afterlife. I could have founded the Church of What’s Happening Now.
331. Having to tend every day, in fact, every hour and every minute, to the needs of the body is already in and of itself the greatest and the most terrible of diseases: in this sense, the body is sick even when it’s healthy, given its incessant need to drink, eat, rest, defecate, breathe, spit, wash itself; it is no less sick in its desires and its lusts than in its requirements. Therefore the true diseases, the one that doctors diagnose with a particular name, are by no means exceptional states, but rather moments when the body, so to speak, finally stops deceiving us, abandons the fiction of health, and reveals clearly its true condition, pathological from the outset. Whatever the disease, therefore, it’s incurable, given that so was the health.
332. Everything can be seen as a progressive mechanism of expulsion. In order not to have to admit the existence of evil, which nonetheless existed in Him, God expelled it, creating Satan. In order to eliminate it from his heart, sin was extracted from man’s rib, and from that rib woman was made: so she will be the cause of the Fall. Out of fear or disgust at having to interact with our fellow man, we Italians invented the formal pronoun “lei,” whereby we speak to an imaginary third person in which we house the personality that has been expelled from the flesh-and-blood interlocutor before us, reduced to a servile spokesman for that respectable virtual master. We have subcontracted many of our duties, thoughts, decisions, and desires to the exterior, to collective institutions: let them take care of them. The impurity of feces is evacuated. Even psychic suffering can be expelled with a pill: but once expelled, where will it wind up, will it dissolve into thin air or will it go to live in some other being, like the legion of demons in the Gospel of Matthew that inhabited a herd of pigs? To save the rest of the body’s life, a gangrenous leg is amputated. We lose the integrity of the whole in order to safeguard it. Now, will that leg be buried in a grave? Does it still belong to someone? Is it someone?
333. All studies are preliminary studies.
334. The two best-known italian novels of the early twentieth century have two assholes for their main characters.
335. Zeno Cosini/Mattia Pascal 6–1, 6–0.
336. She was cross-eyed right down to her thighs (I found the source of this image, too, while leafing through Zeno’s Conscience, where the character of Augusta is described).
339. Asking for protection, demanding protection, everyone understandably wants to be protected. Children first and foremost should be protected, and likewise the weak and the infirm, women demand that they be protected by and from men, meaning that they want a man at their side to protect them, and that they need protection against men, who are often violent and oppressive. But men, too, ask to be protected, from being fired, from disease and death, and they feel frustrated when the state does nothing to help them, when their friends abandon them, when their leader instead of guiding them betrays them. The police, the law, ought to protect us: and instead we become their target. If you fall into the crosshairs of the law, you won’t get back out until you’ve gone through a long nightmare. That is why, in Italy, we always need protectors, mediators, intercessors, beseechers, godfathers, saints to call on in heaven. No one has even the faintest hope of getting by on their own. The only thing you can do alone is kick the bucket, in fact, not even that. And when neither your family nor associations or guilds will protect you, and not even your friendships or the state will protect you, then who do you turn to, if not heaven?
340. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with asking for a little help. It is from heaven that light pours down, from on high, and it’s only from on high that light can descend. Don’t tell me that I talk like a priest. I haven’t talked to anyone for a long time, it was useless, all that came out of my mouth was heresies. The tongue is a vehicle of iniquity, a world of errors, as long as you use it to communicate. When you stop expecting to communicate, on the other hand . . . I’m sorry to say it but, perhaps, whether I were to speak or remain silent, I might deceive all the same.
341. If you’re looking for miracles, here they are: errors prove fertile, disease becomes a way of stalling for time. The waves of the stormy sea have driven the boat into port, chains stretch like rubber bands, an urgent need becomes a hopeful expectation. The true miracle, in other words, isn’t that all this evil and pain should be erased; the true miracle is that all this evil and pain becomes acceptable.
342. A miracle is a perfect story, because it brings together a terrible misfortune with a wonderful salvation.
343. The ignorant and the learned. The ignorant are never entirely ignorant, while the learned are never learned enough.
345. The true miracle takes place continuously, in such a way that it produces the sensation that no miracle is taking place.
348. Doctrines that offer man guarantees against loneliness can be very successful.
350. I’m the least free man in the world. Believing I would enhance my life, I’ve given myself death: privation, indigence, desire, dependency—that is the perennial condition of my spirit. Admiring beauty, I generated new aspirations and therefore new sources of pain.
351. It would be appropriate for thinkers, scientists, and philosophers all to die at age sixty, because past that age they start to oppose new ideas. Perhaps only artists might be allowed a few extra years, as long as they are devoid of prejudices, or sufficiently flexible and lively to come up with new ones: it is, in fact, quite amusing to watch political infatuations among the elderly, for example. Ordinary people like me can live as long as they want, it makes no difference. In fact, I’ve grown old without causing any harm to the progress of knowledge (no one has ever understood why such an intelligent and gifted man should have withdrawn to that private school, to become a teacher . . . that is the great question that hovers around Cosmo . . . the great rationalist who ended up teaching in a school run by priests!).
352. I’ve tried not to get too fond of my ideas, so that I can rid myself of them relatively painlessly as soon as someone comes along who can prove to me that they were false.
353. Why should creatures that do nothing but suffer, desire, with such great frenzy, to reproduce? No one should feel any desire to perpetuate an unbroken state of suffering. There therefore exist, and cannot help but exist, certain pleasures, and even those who have never experienced them intuitively know what these pleasures are, they know, in other words, that however few and far between, they are still possible, and that they might alleviate their inferno from one moment to the next. Ironically, the most intense of these pleasures is the one that is experienced in the act involved in reproduction: thus the circle is closed and the initial question receives a mocking response.
357. The malleable parts of my spirit have grown stiff or dissolved entirely, just like the malleable parts of my body.
358. The things I’ve seen, the things I remember and believe that I’ve seen, the things I’ve imagined seeing are all one with the things I dream.
359. I experience moments of great objectivity. They last for half a
n hour, at the very most an hour or so. In them, things appear for what they are and oddly enough they turn out to be identical to the way they ought to be, there is no gap between images and definitions, nor is there any regret or hope. In those moments, the only activity I’m aware of carrying out is breathing. Breathing. I’m still capable of doing that with no particular effort, and I do. I breathe, I fill up my lungs, I empty them out, the breath enters and exits regularly, and the castle built on clouds that is reality doesn’t collapse, it doesn’t dissolve all at once, nor does it glitter in the distance like a fabulous miracle, but just hangs there, dangling in midair, and I, too, like anyone, inhabit it, at least for a brief interval I have the right to inhabit it. And how did I gain that right? By choosing to stop asking any more questions. This, in fact, was the last question I asked myself, before objectivity, instead of answering questions, extinguished this, too.
360. I don’t believe that God has forgotten me; rather, He would have every reason to suppose that I have forgotten Him. And so, for Him to receive a prayer from me now will arouse His astonishment. Perhaps He will think that I want to ask Him, decidedly far too late, for a favor. From the position of someone on death row, any appeal has a tang of desperation and a whiff of hypocrisy. So you, too, now? Why are you wasting the scant time still remaining to you? When you had vast and limitless amounts of time at your disposal, you didn’t seem so interested in heaven, or frightened of hell . . . But that is not why I am turning to Him: it’s just to reestablish a connection. When was this line last hung up? Many years ago. I couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen . . .
361. In any case, I have the feeling that it will be God who will make the first move. Whatever attitude I might have and whatever state of mind I am able to induce in myself, whether of disbelief or skepticism, it won’t be me who asks but, if anything, He who offers. He is the doctor who goes to pay a call on the sick man, unasked. If not in his room and at his bedside, let’s just say that He is waiting outside the sick man’s house, where the snow is starting to stick on the sidewalks and the breath turns to vapor in front of the faces of the passing pedestrians.
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