The Little Virtues

by Natalia Ginzburg

  And you have to realize that you cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing. You cannot deceive yourself by hoping for caresses and lullabies from your vocation. In my life there have been interminable, desolate empty Sundays in which I desperately wanted to write something that would console me for my loneliness and boredom, so that I could be calmed and soothed by phrases and words. But I could not write a single line. My vocation has always rejected me, it does not want to know about me. Because this vocation is never a consolation or a way of passing the time. It is not a companion. This vocation is a master who is able to beat us till the blood flows, a master who reviles and condemns us. We must swallow our saliva and our tears and grit our teeth and dry the blood from our wounds and serve him. Serve him when he asks. Then he will help us up on to our feet, fix our feet firmly on the ground; he will help us overcome madness and delirium, fever and despair. But he has to be the one who gives the orders and he always refuses to pay attention to us when we need him.

  After the time when I lived in the South I got to know grief very well—a real, irremediable and incurable grief that shattered my life, and when I tried to put it together again I realized that I and my life had become something irreconcilable with what had gone before. Only my vocation remained unchanged, but it is profoundly misleading to say that even that was unchanged—the tools were still the same but the way I used them had altered. At first I hated it, it disgusted me, but I knew very well that I would end up returning to it, and that it would save me. Sometimes I would think that I had not been so unfortunate in my life and that I was unjust when I accused destiny of never having shown me any kindness, because it had given me my three children and my vocation. Besides, I could not imagine my life without my vocation. It was always there, it had never left me for a moment, and when I believed that it slept its vigilant, shining eyes were still watching me.

  Such is my vocation. It does not produce much money and it is always necessary to follow some other vocation simultaneously in order to live. Though sometimes it produces a little, and it is very satisfying to have money because of it—it is like receiving money and presents from the hands of someone you love. Such is my vocation. I do not, I repeat, know much about the value of the results it has given me or could give me: or it would be better to say that I know the relative though certainly not the absolute value of the results I have already obtained. When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn’t matter much to me. Only, I don’t want to think about names: I can see that if l am asked ‘a small writer like who?’ it would sadden me to think of the names of other small writers. I prefer to think that no one has ever been like me, however small, however much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be. The important thing is to be convinced that this really is your vocation, your profession, something you will do all your life. But as a vocation it is no joke. There are innumerable dangers besides those I have mentioned. We are constantly threatened with grave dangers whenever we write a page. There is the danger of suddenly starting to be flirtatious and of singing. I always have a crazy desire to sing and I have to be very careful that I don’t. And there is the danger of cheating with words that do not really exist within us, that we have picked up by chance from outside of ourselves and which we skillfully slip in because we have become a bit dishonest. There is the danger of cheating and being dishonest. As you see, it is quite a difficult vocation, but it is the finest one in the world. The days and houses of our life, the days and houses of the people with whom we are involved, books and images and thoughts and conversations—all these things feed it, and it grows within us. It is a vocation which also feeds on terrible things, it swallows the best and the worst in our lives and our evil feelings flow in its blood just as much as our benevolent feelings. It feeds itself, and grows within us.

  Silence

  I heard Pelléas et Mélisande. I know nothing about music, but I found myself comparing words from old opera libretti (‘I will atone with my blood—the love which I placed in you’)—ponderous, gory, heavy words, with the fugitive, watery words (‘J’ai froid—ta chevelure’) of Pelléas et Mélisande.

  I began to wonder if that (Pelléas et Mélisande) were not the beginning of our silence.

  Because silence must be numbered among the strangest and gravest vices of our time. Those of us who have tried to write novels in our time know the discomfort and unhappiness that appears as soon as we reach the point when we have to make our characters talk to one another. For page after page our characters exchange comments that are insignificant but pregnant with a desolate unhappiness: ‘Are you cold?’ ‘No, I’m not cold.’ ‘Would you like some tea?’ ‘No thanks.’ ‘Are you tired?’ ‘I don’t know. Yes, perhaps I’m a bit tired.’ This is how our characters talk. They talk like this to kill time. They talk like this because they don’t know how to talk any more. Little by little the most important matters, the most terrible confessions, come out: ‘You killed him?’ ‘Yes, I killed him.’ The meagre barren words of our time are painfully wrung from silence and appear like the signals of castaways, beacons lit on the most distant hills, weak, desperate summonses that are swallowed up in space.

  And so when we want to make our characters talk, we measure the profound silence that has, little by little, built up within us. We began to be silent as children, at table, in front of our parents who still spoke to us using the old, heavy, gory words. We remained silent. We remained silent as a protest and as a mark of contempt. We remained silent so that our parents would realize that their ponderous words were no longer any use to us. We had others that we kept in reserve. We would use these new words of ours later, with people who would understand them. Our silence was our wealth. Now we are ashamed of it and desperate and we know all the misery it brings. We shall never be free of it again. Those ponderous words that served our parents are a currency that has been withdrawn and which no one accepts. And we realize that the new words have no value, that we can buy nothing with them. They are no use for establishing relationships, they are watery, cold, sterile. They are no use for writing books, for linking us with someone we love, for saving a friend.

  It is well known that a feeling of guilt is one of the vices of our time; a great deal is talked and written about it. We all suffer from it. We feel ourselves to be involved with something that gets filthier with every day that passes. And there is also the feeling of panic; we all suffer from that too. The feeling of panic comes from the feeling of guilt. And a man who is panic-stricken and guilty stays silent.

  Everyone looks in his own way for something that will cure the silence, the feeling of guilt, the feeling of panic. Some people travel. In their anxiety to see new countries and new people there is the hope that they will leave behind their own obscure ghosts; there is the secret hope that somewhere on the earth they will find the one person who could talk to them. Some people get drunk in order to forget their own obscure ghosts, and to talk. And then there are all the things people do so that they do not have to talk: some people spend their evenings stretched out in the cinema with a woman beside them to whom, in this way, they don’t have to talk; some people learn how to play bridge; some people make love, which can also be done without talking. Usually they say they are doing these things to kill time; in fact they do them to kill the silence.

  There are two kinds of silence; silence with oneself and silence with others. Both kinds make us suffer equally. The silence with ourselves is dominated by a violent dislike for our own existence, by a contempt for our own soul which seems so vile that it is not worth speaking to. Clearly we have to break this silence with ourselves if we wish to try and break the silence with others. Clearly we have no right to hate ourselves, no right to say nothing about our thoughts to our own souls.

  The commonest way
of freeing oneself from silence is to be psychoanalysed. To talk endlessly about oneself to a person who listens, who is paid to listen: to uncover the roots of our own silence: yes, this can give some momentary relief. But the silence is profound and universal. We rediscover it as soon as we have left the room in which that person, paid to listen, listened to us. We immediately sink into it again. And then this hour’s relief seems superficial and banal to us. Silence is worldwide: someone who cures it in one of us for one hour does nothing towards solving the common problem.

  When we go to be psychoanalysed we are told that we must stop hating ourselves so violently. But in order to free us from this hatred, to free us from this guilt, this feeling of panic, this silence, we are told that we must live according to nature, that we must indulge our instincts, that we must follow our own desires: that we must make a free choice of our lives. But to make a free choice of your life is not to live according to nature; it is to live unnaturally, because man is not always given a free choice: he does not choose the hour of his birth, or his face, or his parents, or his childhood; he does not normally choose the hour of his death. A man has no choice but to accept his face as he has no choice but to accept his destiny: and the only choice he is permitted is the choice between good and evil, between justice and injustice, between truth and lies. The things they tell those of us who go to be psychoanalysed are of no use to us because they do not take our moral responsibility—which is the only choice permitted us in life—into account; those of us who have been psychoanalysed know only too well how rarefied, unnatural and finally unbreathable is that atmosphere of ephemeral freedom in which we live just as we wish.

  Usually this vice of silence that poisons our epoch is summed up by a cliché, ‘We have lost the art of conversation’. This is the frivolous, commonplace expression of a real and tragic truth. When we say ‘the art of conversation’ we are not saying anything that helps us to live; what we lack is the opportunity of free, normal relationships between men, and we miss it to such an extent that some of us are driven to suicide by our awareness of this absence. Every day silence harvests its victims. Silence is a mortal illness.

  Today, as never before, the fates of men are so intimately linked to one another that a disaster for one is a disaster for everybody. It is strange but true that men find themselves intimately linked to one another’s destinies to such an extent that the fall of one sweeps away thousands of others, and at the same time they are all smothered by silence, incapable of exchanging a single unconstrained word. For this reason—because one person’s disaster is everyone’s disaster—the ways of curing this silence that have been suggested to us are clearly unreal. We have been advised to defend ourselves from despair with egotism. But egotism has never solved despair. And we are too used to calling our soul’s vices illnesses, to putting up with them and to letting them rule our lives, or to soothing them with sweet syrups in order to cure them as if they were illnesses. Silence must be faced and judged from a moral standpoint. It is not given to us to choose whether we are happy or unhappy. But we must choose not to be demonically unhappy. Silence can become a closed, monstrous, demonic unhappiness: it withers the days of our youth and makes our bread bitter. It can lead, as I have said, to death.

  Silence must be faced and judged from a moral standpoint. Because silence, like acedia and like luxury, is a sin. The fact that in our time it is a sin common to all our fellow men, that it is the bitter fruit of our sick times, does not excuse us from recognizing it for what it is and from calling it by its true name.

  Human Relationships

  The problem of our relationships with other human beings lies at the centre of our life: as soon as we become aware of this—that is, as soon as we clearly see it as a problem and no longer as the muddle of unhappiness, we start to look for its origins, and to reconstruct its course throughout our whole life.

  When we are little children we have our eyes fixed above all on the world of adults, which is dark and mysterious to us. It seems absurd to us because we don’t understand any of the words which adults say to one another, or the sense of their decisions and actions, or the reasons for their changes of mood and sudden outbursts of anger. We don’t understand the words which adults say to each other and we are not interested in them; on the contrary they are infinitely boring to us. What interests us are the decisions of theirs that can alter our daily routine, the black moods that spoil lunches and suppers, the sudden slamming of doors, and voices raised in the night. We realize that at any moment an unexpected storm—complete with the sound of doors being slammed and objects being hurled about—can irrupt from a few quiet words. We nervously listen for the slightest indication of violence in the voices that are talking. We can be alone and absorbed in play when, suddenly, angry voices are raised in the house: we go on playing mechanically, pushing pebbles and grass into a little heap of earth to make a hill: but we are no longer interested in the little hill because we know that we cannot be happy until the house is at peace again; doors slam and we jump; angry words fly from one room to Another—words that are incomprehensible to us and we do not try to understand them or discover the murky reasons for their existence, we vaguely think that whatever reasons there may be must be horrible; we are so weighed down by all the absurd mystery of adult life. And sometimes this complicates our relationships with other children, with the world of our equals: sometimes we have a friend with us who has come to play; we are making a little hill with him when a slammed door tells us that peace is at an end; burning with shame we pretend to be extremely interested in the little hill, we do our utmost to distract our friend’s attention from the brutal voices that are re-echoing through the house; with hands that are suddenly sweaty and tired we precisely push our little bits of wood into the heap of earth. We are absolutely certain that no one ever argues or screams brutal words at one another in our friend’s house; in our friend’s house everyone is calm and cultured, and arguing is a shame peculiar to our house; then one day we discover with immense relief that they argue in our friend’s house just as they do in our house, as they do perhaps in every house on earth.

  We become adolescents when the words that adults exchange with one another become intelligible to us; intelligible, but of no interest because we no longer care whether peace reigns in the house or not. Now we are able to follow the ins and outs of family rows and to foresee their course and how long they will last; and we are not afraid of them anymore, doors slam and we do not jump. The house is no longer what it was for us before, it is no longer the point from which we look out on the rest of the universe, it is a place where—by chance—we eat and live: we eat quickly, lending one inattentive ear to the adults’ conversation—a conversation which is intelligible to us but which strikes us as useless; we eat and quickly escape to our rooms so that we don’t have to listen to their useless conversation; and we are able to be perfectly happy even if the adults around us are arguing and sulking day in day out. The things that matter to us no longer happen within the walls of our house but outside, in the street and at school; we feel that we cannot be happy if the other children at school look down on us in any way. We would do anything to escape their contempt; and we do anything. We write comic verses to amuse our friends, which we recite to them with ridiculous grimaces that we are ashamed of afterwards; we collect obscene words so that they will think well of us, we go looking all day long for obscene words in the books and dictionaries that we have in the house; and because it seems to us that a showy, gaudy way of dressing is popular with our friends we (against our mother’s wishes) try to add something that is a bit showy and vulgar to our quiet clothes. We vaguely feel that if we are looked down on it is above all because we are shy: who knows, perhaps that moment long ago when we were making a little heap of earth with our friend and the doors slammed and brutal voices re­ echoed and shame burnt our cheeks, perhaps it was that moment which planted the roots of shyness in us: and we think that our whole life will have to be spent in fre
eing ourselves from this shyness, in learning to move under the gaze of others with the same self-confidence and carelessness as when we are alone. We think of our shyness as the most important obstacle to winning sympathy and universal approbation: and we are hungry and thirsty for this approbation: in our lonely daydreams we see ourselves riding triumphantly on horseback through a city, in the midst of an applauding, adoring crowd.

  At home we punish the adults—whose absurdly mysterious ways weighed us down for so many years—with our profound contempt, with our taciturn, impenetrable faces; their mystery has obsessed us for so many years, and now we take our revenge by confronting them with our mystery, a silent impenetrable face and eyes of stone. And we also take revenge on the adults at home for the contempt shown us by other school-children. It seems to us that this contempt includes not only us but our whole family, our social position, the furnishings in our home, our parents’ habits and behaviour. Every now and then anger erupts in the house as of old, but now it is directed at us, at our stony faces: a whirlwind of violent language breaks over us; doors slam but we do not jump; now the doors slam because of us as we sit unmoving at the table, with a disdainful smile: later on, alone in our room, our disdainful smile suddenly melts away and we burst into tears and daydream about our loneliness and how the others do not understand us; and we feel strangely happy to be pouring out these scalding tears and stifling our sobs in a cushion. Then mother arrives and is touched at the sight of our tears and offers to take us out for an ice­cream or to the cinema; with our red, swollen eyes, but stony-faced and impenetrable again, we sit next to mother at a little table in a cafe, eating ice-cream with a tiny spoon; all around us moves a crowd of people who are apparently calm and light-hearted while we, oh we are the gloomiest, most gauche and detestable thing on earth.