The trouble with Paul was that he was as profligate with his intellectual fortune as he was with his financial fortune, but his intellect, unlike his finances, was inexhaustible. He never ceased to throw it out of the window, yet it never ceased to grow; the more he threw it out of the window, the more it grew. It is characteristic of people like Paul, who are at first merely crazy and are finally pronounced insane, that their intellectual fortune increases as fast as they throw it out of the window (of the mind). As they throw more and more of it out of the window, it goes on building up in the mind and naturally becomes more and more dangerous. Eventually they cannot keep up the pace, with the result that the mind can no longer endure the buildup and finally explodes. Paul’s mind quite simply exploded because he could not discard his intellectual fortune fast enough. In the same way Nietzsche’s mind exploded, just as all the other mad philosophical minds exploded, because they could no longer sustain the pace. Their intellectual fortune builds up at a faster and fiercer rate than they can discard it, then one day the mind explodes and they are dead. In the same way Paul’s mind exploded one day and he was dead. We were alike and yet completely different. Paul, for instance, had a concern for the poor and was also touched by them: I too had a concern for the poor, but I was not touched by them; my mind works in such a way that I have never been able to be touched as Paul was. On one occasion Paul burst into tears at the sight of a child squatting by the Traunsee. I saw at once that it had actually been stationed there by a scheming mother in order to arouse sympathy and a bad conscience in passersby and induce them to open their wallets. Unlike Paul, I saw not only the wretched child, shamefully exploited by a greedy mother, but the mother herself, crouching in the bushes and counting a wad of bills in an appallingly businesslike manner. Paul saw only the child and its wretchedness, not the mother in the background, counting the takings. He actually cried and gave the child a hundred-schilling bill, feeling ashamed of his own existence, as it were. While I saw through the whole scene, Paul saw only the surface—the distress of the innocent child, not the monstrous mother in the background. This shameful exploitation of my friend’s good nature was bound to remain concealed from him, while I could not fail to see it. It was typical of him that he saw only the superficial picture of the suffering child and parted with the hundred-schilling bill, while I could not help seeing through the whole scene and naturally gave the child nothing. And it was typical of our relationship that I kept my observation to myself, wishing to spare my friend, and did not tell him about the unspeakable mother counting her money behind the bushes and forcing her child to act out this charade of suffering. I left him with his superficial view of the scene; I let him give the child the hundred-schilling bill and go on blubbering, and even later I forbore to enlighten him. He often referred to this incident and recounted how he had given a hundred-schilling bill to a poor lonely child (in my presence), but I never disclosed the truth of the matter. Where the wretchedness—or ostensible wretchedness—of human beings (and humanity) was concerned, Paul never saw beneath the surface; he never saw the whole picture as I did, and the likelihood is, I fancy, that throughout his life he quite simply refused to see the whole picture, contenting himself with surface appearances for reasons of self-protection. I was never content with surface appearances—also for reasons of self-protection. That was the difference between us. In the first half of his life Paul squandered millions in the belief that he was helping the helpless (and thereby himself!), but in reality he squandered those millions on the basest and unworthiest causes—though in doing so he was of course helping himself. He continued to squander his money on those who were supposedly destitute and deserving of charity until he had none left, until he was thrown upon the mercy of his family, but their mercy was short-lived and quickly withdrawn, since mercy was to them an alien concept. Paul, for his sins, was born into one of Austria’s three or four richest families, whose millions automatically multiplied year by year under the monarchy, until the proclamation of the republic led to the stagnation of the Wittgenstein fortune. Paul very soon threw away his share, more or less in the belief that by doing so he could combat poverty. The result was that for most of his life he had virtually nothing, being persuaded, like his uncle Ludwig, that it was his duty to distribute his dirty millions among his spotless fellowmen and so ensure their salvation and his own. Paul would walk through the streets with wads of hundred-schilling bills in order to distribute those dirty bills among his spotless fellow citizens. But the recipients were nearly always like the Traunsee child: wherever he found people to press his money on, in order to help them and to make himself feel good, they were always Traunsee children. When his money was gone, his relatives supported him for a very short time, acting out of a certain perverse sense of propriety, not out of generosity and not as a matter of course, because they too, it must be said, saw not just the superficial aspect of his situation but the whole dreadful picture. For a whole century the Wittgensteins had produced weapons and machines, until finally they produced Ludwig and Paul—the famous, epoch-making philosopher and the madman who, in Vienna at least, was equally famous and possibly more so. Paul the madman was just as philosophical as his uncle Ludwig, while Ludwig the philosopher was just as mad as his nephew Paul. Ludwig became famous through his philosophy, Paul through his madness. The one was possibly more philosophical, the other possibly more mad. But it may well be that the philosophical Wittgenstein is regarded as a philosopher merely because he set his philosophy down on paper and not his madness, and that Paul is regarded as a madman because he suppressed his philosophy instead of publishing it, and displayed only his madness. Both were quite extraordinary men with quite extraordinary brains; the one published his brain, and the other did not. I would go so far as to say that whereas the one published his brain, the other put his brain into practice. And where is the distinction between a brain that is published and constantly publishing itself and a brain that is constantly putting itself into practice? Yet if Paul had published anything, it would have been quite different from anything that Ludwig published, just as Ludwig would have practiced a form of madness quite different from Paul’s. In either case, the Wittgenstein name guaranteed a certain standard, indeed the highest standard. Paul the madman unquestionably achieved a standard equal to that of Ludwig the philosopher: the one represents a high point in philosophy and the history of ideas, the other a high point in the history of madness—that is, if we insist on adhering to the conventional designations of philosophy, history, ideas, and madness, which are nothing but perverse historical concepts. (Wittgenstein's Nephew)

I thought of how I had met this man, who really had been my friend, who had so often brought so much happiness into my existence, which, though not actually unhappy, was a burden most of the time, who had acquainted me with so much that was at first quite foreign to me, pointing me in ways I had not known before, opening doors that had previously been closed, and who brought me back to my true self at the crucial moment when I might easily have gone to pieces in the country. For before I met my friend there had been a period when I was prey to a morbid melancholy, if not depression, when I really believed I was lost, when for years I did no proper work but spent most of my days in a state of total apathy and often came close to putting an end to my life by my own hand. For years I had taken refuge in a terrible suicidal brooding, which deadened my mind and made everything unendurable, above all myself—brooding on the utter futility all around me, into which I had been plunged by my general weakness, but above all my weakness of character. For a long time I could not imagine being able to go on living, or even existing. I was no longer capable of seizing upon any purpose in life that would have given me control over myself. Every morning on waking I was inevitably caught up in this mechanism of suicidal brooding, and I remained in its grip throughout the day. And I was deserted by everyone because I had deserted everyone—that is the truth—because I no longer wanted anyone. I no longer wanted anything, but I was too much of a coward to make an end of it all. It was probably at the height of my despair—a word that I am not ashamed to use, as I no longer intend to deceive myself or gloss over anything, since nothing can be glossed over in a society and a world that perpetually seeks to gloss over everything in the most sickening manner—that Paul appeared on the scene at Irina’s apartment in the Blumenstockgasse. He was so different from anyone I had ever met, so new to my experience (and with a name, moreover, that for decades I had revered like no other), that I at once felt him to be my deliverer. Sitting on the park bench, I suddenly saw it all clearly again, and I was not ashamed of the pathos I succumbed to, of the fine words that I allowed to flow into me for the very first time; they suddenly made me feel tremendously good, and I made no attempt to tone them down. I let them all descend on me like a refreshing rain. And today it seems to me that we can count on the fingers of one hand all the people who have really meant anything to us in the course of our lives, and very often this one hand protests at our perversity in believing that we need a whole hand in order to count them, for to be honest we could probably make do without a single finger. There are times, however, when life is endurable, and at such times we occasionally manage to count three or four people to whom in the long run we owe something, and not just something but a great deal—people who have meant everything and been everything to us at certain critical moments or certain critical periods of our lives. Yet we know that as we get older we have to employ ever subtler means in order to produce such endurable conditions, resorting to every possible and impossible trick the mind can devise, though it may be stretched to the limits of its tolerance even without having to perform such unnatural feats. Yet at the same time we should not forget that the few people in question are all dead, that they died long ago, for bitter experience naturally inhibits us from including the living in our calculation—those who are still with us, perhaps even at our side—unless we want to risk being totally, embarrassingly, and ludicrously wrong, and hence making fools of ourselves, above all in our own eyes. (Wittgenstein's Nephew)

I read and I am set free. I gain objectivity. I have ceased to be my usual disparate self. And what I read, rather than being a near-invisible suit that sometimes weighs on me, becomes instead the great clarity of the outside world, in which everything is worthy of note, the sun that everyone can see, the moon that weaves a web of shadows on the still earth, the vast spaces that open out into the sea, the dark solidity of the trees waving aloft their green branches, the solid peace of ponds in gardens, the paths thick with vines on the terraced slopes of the hills.

I read like someone abdicating from life. And since the crown and the royal mantle never look as grand as when the departing King deposits them on the ground, I set down on the mosaic floor of the antechambers all my past triumphs of tedium and dreams, and ascend the steps wearing only the nobility of seeing.

I read like someone who just happens to be passing. And it is in the classics, with those who are calm of mind and who, if they suffer, do not speak of it, that I feel myself to be a sacred passerby, an anointed pilgrim, a purposeless observer of a purposeless world, a Prince of the Great Exile, who, as he left, made of his desolation a final gift of alms to the last beggar. (The Book of Disquiet)

And in this dreadful state of mind I sat for hours, for days on end with my face to the wall, tormenting myself and gradually discovering the horror of finding that even the smallest task or duty, for instance arranging assorted objects in a drawer, can be beyond one’s power. It was as if an illness that had been latent in me for a long time were now threatening to erupt, as if some soul-destroying and inexorable force had fastened upon me and would gradually paralyze my entire system. I already felt in my head the dreadful torpor that heralds disintegration of the personality, I sensed that in truth I had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence, that all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world. If someone had come then to lead me away to a place of execution I would have gone meekly, without a word, without so much as opening my eyes, just as people who suffer from violent seasickness, if they are crossing the Caspian Sea on a steamer, for instance, will not offer the slightest resistance should someone tell them that they are about to be thrown overboard. (Austerlitz)

BARTHÉLÉMY PRUNIÈRES

Barthélémy Prunières is on the Causse Méjan. He is looking for dead men. This is his passion. The fact that he is a doctor in Marjevols is of little importance: he prefers bodies that have ceased to suffer to the suffering bodies of his daily round. If at this very moment God or the devil were to appear before him on the causse and command him to justify his life, he would say, I am an anthropologist, a member of the Anthropological Society of Lille, the Anthropological Society of Paris, and the Anthropological Society of Bordeaux; in August 1870 I telegraphed my resignation to the Anthropological Society of Berlin. There is not a Society in Europe that does not know of me. I have shifted enormous quantities of ancient remains. I have studied Baumes-Chaudes Man, a fine dolichocephalic troglodyte who ate hare in huge dishes of unglazed clay, and it was I who named him. I studied Causse Man, the brachycephalus with the highly orthognatic face who belongs to the race I called dolmenic—it was I who named it. I had the honor of discovering that in both racial groups, the dolmenic as well as the troglodyte, individuals destined for the role of shaman underwent substantial trepanation in their early years; that a circular piece of bone the size of a five-franc silver coin was removed from their cranium; that this piece of bone removed from their head was worn round the neck as an amulet and made them all-powerful. To people who were disturbed by the barbarity of these practices, I said that gods who asked of man nothing more than a piece of his skull might be considered lenient. What the gods ask of me, each day, is to piece together the infinite puzzle of dead humanity.

He is on the Causse Méjan, at the southwest edge, just before the causse tips passionately down to the bed of the River Jonte, toward Saint-Pierre-les-Tripiés; he is on the site of the Cave of the Dead Man, which of course was named by him. It is autumn in 1871. The site is an ossuary in a rock shelter, which Prunières discovered in the spring of 1870; he dug it only once; he left little protection for it, thinking he would be back in a month or two. But war came, and with it the uhlans and sabers that perform excellent trepanations, and the gods who, when all is said and done, are lenient and will trade two years of famine for a brand-new republic. There have been two years of rain, frost, rodents, and landslips on the causse; when Prunières returns, half the ossuary has fallen into the gully.

It is autumn. Prunières has brought along Dr. Broca, president of the Anthropological Society of Paris (a man who knows us in his own particular way, though we do not know him: inside our skulls we each carry a cerebral convolution known as Broca’s area). All day long they have assembled and named bones, like the gravedigger in Hamlet. They have placed them in two large crates that the curé of Saint-Pierre had carpentered for them. It’s the end of the day. Broca is tired and stands smoking a cigar outside the cave; he looks at the autumn, the troglodyte bones in the curé’s crate; he thinks about things and about the naming of things. Prunières is carrying out a final inspection of the gully before leaving. And there, three hundred meters farther down, he finds a very fine, very white humerus. At the same time as the bone, he finds the simple, beautiful sentence he will utter at the Bordeaux Anthropological Congress on September 12, 1872: “All the bones had been bleached white by the rain, the dew, and the snow.”

In December 1893, Dr. Prunières is returning in the depths of night after attending a birth on the Aubrac plateau. He is caught in a snowstorm. He struggles on for several hours—he has a strong constitution, hardened by handling suffering bodies and bodies that have ceased to suffer. Then he gives up the struggle and settles himself between three rocks like an old troglodyte. He says to himself, “I am going to die.” He repeats to himself, “Baumes-Chaudes Man, the troglodyte race, the dolmenic race, circular pieces of skull.” He says to himself that his body will not be found. Aloud, he says, “All the bones had been bleached white by the rain, the dew, and the snow.” The snow lays a maternal blanket over him.

He was still alive when he was found in the morning. He died during the day, from acute pulmonary edema.(Winter Mythologies and Abbots)

K. always wants to reach the goal before having reached it. This demand for a premature dénouement is the principle of figuration: it engenders the image, or, if you will, the idol, and the curse which attaches to it is that which attaches to idolatry. Man wants unity right away; he wants it in separation itself. He represents it to himself, and this representation, the image of unity, immediately reconstitutes the element of dispersion where he loses himself more and more. For the image as such can never be attained, and moreover it hides from him the unity of which it is the image. It separates him from unity by making itself inaccessible and by making unity inaccessible.

[...]

We could summarize this situation as follows: it is impatience which makes the goal inaccessible by substituting for it the proximity of an intermediary figure. It is impatience that destroys the way toward the goal by preventing us from recognizing in the intermediary the figure of the immediate. (The Space of Literature)

Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, cuts through to the point where the meaning of the world is tied to thousands of words in constant use, severs all of these strings, and turns into a balloon floating off into space. If this is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was. (The Man Without Qualities)

Metaphor . . . is like the image that fuses several meanings in a dream; it is the gliding logic of the soul, corresponding to the way things relate to each other in the intuitions of art and religion. But even what there is in life of common likes and dislikes, accord and rejection, admiration, subordination, leadership, imitation, and their opposites, the many ways man relates to himself and to nature, which are not yet and perhaps never will be purely objec- tive, cannot be understood other than in metaphorical or figura- tive terms. No doubt what is called the higher humanism is only the effort to fuse together these two great halves of life, metaphor and truth, once they have been carefully distinguished from each other. But once one has distinguished everything in a metaphor that might be true from what is mere froth, one usually has gained a little truth, but at the cost of destroying the whole value of the metaphor. (The Man Without Qualities)

They are acting in the past. They don’t know it. It takes a long time to realize that there is a past… It takes a long time to understand anything at all about what we call the past — and begin to be liberated from it. Those kids are romantic, not even revolutionaries. At least not yet. They don’t know what revolution entails. They think everything is happening in the present. They think they are the present. They think that nothing ever happened before in the whole history of the world.

I reached at once what I conceived the proper length for my intended poema length of about one hundred lines. It is, in fact, a hundred and eight. ("The Philosophy of Composition")

Contemporaneity, flowing and transitory, "low," present-this "life without beginning or end" was a subject of representation only in the low genres. Most importantly, it was the basic subject matter in that broadest and richest of realms, the common people's creative culture of laughter. In the aforementioned work I tried to indicate the enormous influence exercised by this realm-in the ancient world as well as the Middle Ages-on the birth and formation of novelistic language. It was equally significant for all other historical factors in the novelistic genre, during their emergence and early formation. Precisely here, in popular laughter, the authentic folkloric roots of the novel are to be sought. The present, contemporary life as such, "I myself" and "my contemporaries," "my time"-all these concepts were originally the objects of ambivalent laughter, at the same time cheerful and annihilating. It is precisely here that a fundamentally new attitude toward language and toward the word is generated. Alongside direct representation-laughing at living realitythere flourish parody and travesty of all high genres and of all lofty models embodied in national myth. The "absolute past" of gods, demigods and heroes is here, in parodies and even more so in travesties, "contemporized": it is brought low, represented on a plane equal with contemporary life, in an everyday environment, in the low language of contemporaneity.

[...]

Precisely what is this novelistic spirit in these serio-comical genres, and on what basis do we claim them as the first step in the development of the novel? It is this: contemporary reality serves as their subject, and-even more important-it is the starting point for understanding, evaluating and formulating such genres. For the first time, the subject of serious literary representation (although, it is true, at the same time comical) is portrayed without any distance, on the level of contemporary reality, in a zone of direct and even crude contact. Even where the past or myth serves as the subject of representation in these genres there is no epic distance, and contemporary reality provides the point of view. Of special significance in this process of demolishing distance is the comical origin of these genres: they derive from folklore (popular laughter). It is precisely laughter that destroys the epic, and in general destroys any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance. As a distanced image a subject cannot be comical; to be made comical, it must be brought close. Everything that makes us laugh is close at hand, all comical creativity works in a zone of maximal proximity. Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically. As it draws an object to itself and makes it familiar, laughter delivers the object into the fearless hands of investigative experiment-both scientific and artisticand into the hands of free experimental fantasy. Familiarization of the world through laughter and popular speech is an extremely important and indispensable step in making possible free, scientifically knowable and artistically realistic creativity in European civilization.

The plane of comic (humorous) representation is a specific plane in its spatial as well as its temporal aspect. Here the role of memory is minimal; in the comic world there is nothing for memory and tradition to do. One ridicules in order to forget. This is the zone of maximally familiar and crude contact; laughter means abuse, and abuse could lead to blows. Basically this is uncrowning, that is, the removal of an object from the distanced plane, the destruction of epic distance, an assault on and destruction of the distanced plane in general. In this plane (the plane of laughter) one can disrespectfully walk around whole objects; therefore, the back and rear portion of an object (and also its innards, not normally accessible for viewing) assume a special importance. The object is broken apart, laid bare (its hierarchical ornamentation is removed): the naked object is ridiculous; its "empty" clothing, stripped and separated from its person, is also ridiculous. What takes place is a comical operation of dismemberment. ("Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel" in The Dialogic Imagination)

When I was a young writer, I was jealous of the writers who had their own cities. Of Jorge Luis Borges who had Buenos Aires and always wrote about this fabulous city. Of Fyodor Dostoevsky who had Saint Petersburg. Of Lawrence Durrell who had Alexandria. Of course, James Joyce invented, in a way, a fabulous Dublin. I had in mind, by writing, to appropriate my own city. If I couldn’t find an interesting real city, I should invent it. So, in a way I recreated Bucharest, and, in another way, I invented it. If you come to Bucharest, you will very soon realize that it has little to do with its image in my novels. I’ve invented much of it. I tried to create a coherent image of, as I call it in my novel, “the saddest city in the world”, a city full of ruins, a city full of images of the old glory which is no more. I made Bucharest in my own image, in my own personality. I tried to transform it into some sort of alter ego or a twin brother. I projected myself on the very eclectic architecture of this city, which has several layers of history and architecture.

[...]

Now we’ve arrived at the problem of how I write and this, in my opinion, is very interesting because I don’t know any other writer who does that. I write by hand, without any plan, without a synopsis. My way of writing is a pure and continuous inspiration. Let’s say, today I’m in the middle of a novel and I have to write one page or two like every day. What I do is, I read the page I wrote on the previous day and I try to write in the same key, like a musician. On each and every page I have the chance to change everything, to change the meaning and the course of the novel. 

It’s madness to write like that, without knowing what you’re going to put on the next page. It’s like using a 3D printer to make a car, not by assembling all its parts, but by making the lights at the front of the car first, then the windscreen, then the seats, then the engine, everything up to the back of the car instead of making everything at once. I have to have enormous faith in what my mind can do because otherwise you cannot write like this. It’s writing like a poet, not like a prose writer. 

Of course, when you write this way you can fail very, very easily because on each and every page you have to decide your book’s trajectory. It’s as if there are crossroads everywhere, all demanding a decision. But here is the trick: it’s not you who decides but your mind. Your mind knows better than you do what it is going to do and where it wants to go. It’s like a horse running a race: the jockey doesn’t win the race – the race is won by the horse. The jockey should be very small, very light, and should only touch the horse in very few places. The ideal would be that the jockey doesn’t touch the horse at all, that he just flies above it. It’s your horse, your mind that wins the race, not you. You are the small person that guides the horse, nothing else.

So, I usually let my mind work. I do not touch my book but let it flow in every direction, wherever it wants to go. I’m only the portal, the medium, nothing but the voice of someone inside, and it is this person who actually dictates this book. Sometimes, it feels as if the text is already written on the page and I only remove the white stripes that cover the words. I just erase them and let the text appear. (interview)

We can endure any truth, however destructive, provided it replaces everything, provided it affords as much vitality as the hope for which it substitutes. (The Trouble with Being Born)

The other, not the self, should be the center of whatever “communication” might mean. An episode from the life of William James captures the problem well. He had been given charge of a turtle’s heart for a popular lecture on physiology by one of his Harvard Medical School professors. The lecturer was demonstrating that the heart would pulsate when certain of its nerves were stimulated, and the pulsations were projected onto a screen in the front of Sanders Theatre. Halfway through the lecture, James realized the heart was not responding, so he took it upon himself, in a sudden and almost automatic response to the emergency, to make the proper motions on the screen by manipulating his forefinger such that the audience would not fail to gain a true understanding of the heart’s physiology. Writing many years later—in a final essay on psychical research that was centrally about the balance of fraud and faith in what we can know—James admits that such simulation could be disdained as shameless cheating.2 Had he acted otherwise, however, the audience would have been cheated of an understanding of physiology. His forefinger had performed humbug in the service of understanding. Confessing his prestidigitation or the demise of the heart would have offered only a secondary truth: the flaws of the apparatus rather than its capacity to project truth. All our knowledge, he suggests, may rest on strategically concealed frauds—or rather, what would be considered frauds by those who still hold to a copy theory of knowledge. The criterion for knowing should not be accurate duplication of the world, but the ability to make our way through with the best aids we can get. (Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication)

and then he looks down at the floor in that way he has and when Åsleik looks down in that way it’s like he isn’t looking down, it’s like he’s looking up, like he’s looking at everything all together, like he’s seeing a big context without being clear about it and then something comes over his face, yes, it’s like he is suddenly falling out of this evil world and into a still and peaceful clearing or clarity, an area of stillness, of light, yes, of shining darkness, because it’s like he’s fallen out of himself, out of where he usually is, like he no longer knows himself, like he’s gone, away from himself, as he stands there looking down with a light that’s like what the sky can give off, together with the clouds, when that’s what the light wants to do, yes, a light like that comes from him, the kind of light that can come from a dog too, from a dog’s eyes, yes, that happens a lot, when I think about it I’ve often seen that strange light coming from a dog’s eyes (The Other Name)

I hurried to the spinet desk, I put the dippen in the violet ink, I praised the Lord almost, though my Lord you must understand I see as a kind of doglike man with a sad face Who watches the gate here, He never says anything to me, He knows my suffering, and He knows that my buddies are not as dead as I, and He knows I must walk upon the earth for a spell before going down into the total mulberry night. (In a Shallow Grave)

Symbols apart, his political views were of an extraordinary solidity and had that freedom of great character such as is made possible only by a total absence of doubts. As the heir to a feudal estate he was a member of the Upper House, but he was not politically active, nor did he hold a post at Court or in the government. He was “nothing but a patriot.” But precisely because of this, and because of his independent wealth, he had become the focus for all other patriots who followed with concern the development of the Empire and of mankind. The ethical obligation not to remain a passive onlooker but to “offer a helping hand from above” permeated his life. He was convinced that “the people” were “good.” Since not only his many officials, employees, and servants but countless others depended on him for their economic security, he had never known “the people” in any other respect, except on Sundays and holidays, when they poured out from behind the scenery as a cheerful, colorful throng, like an opera chorus. Anything that did not fit in with this image he attributed to “subversive elements,” the work of irresponsible, callow, sensation-seeking individuals. Brought up in a religious and feudal spirit, never exposed to contradiction through having to deal with middle-class people, not unread, but as an aftereffect of the clerical instruction of his sheltered youth prevented for the rest of his life from recognizing in a book anything other than agreement with or mistaken divergence from his own principles, he knew the outlook of more up-to-date people only from the controversies in Parliament or in the newspapers. And since he knew enough to recognize the many superficialities there, he was daily confirmed in his prejudice that the true bourgeois world, more deeply understood, was basically nothing other than what he himself conceived it to be. In general, “the true” prefixed to political convictions was one of his aids for finding his way in a world that although created by God too often denied Him. He was firmly convinced that even true socialism fitted in with his view of things. He had had from the beginning, in fact, a deeply personal notion, which he had never fully acknowledged even to himself, to build a bridge across which the socialists were to come marching into his own camp. It is obvious that helping the poor is a proper chivalric task, and that for the true high nobility there was really no very great difference between a middle-class factory owner and his workers. “We’re all socialists at heart” was one of his pet sayings, meaning no more and no less than that there were no social distinctions in the hereafter. In this world, however, he considered them necessary facts of life, and expected the working class, after due attention to its material welfare, to resist the unreasonable slogans imported by foreign agitators and to accept the natural order of things in a world where everyone finds duty and prosperity in his allotted place. The true aristocrat accordingly seemed as important to him as the true artisan, and the solution of political and economic questions was subsumed for him in a harmonious vision he called “Fatherland.” (The Man Wihout Qualities)

In those years, the intoxication of defending tradition to the furthest extreme and the opposite thrill of shaking off tradition were mixed: generally we think of only the latter approach as somehow exalting, capable of generating euphoria, an unstoppable wave that rises higher and higher, until it sweeps away the old state of things. But truth be told, reactionaries and religious bigots were starting a riot all their own, a visceral response, a savage sentiment that came from the gut … that fed on desire much more than it was fueled by reality. In fact, nobody gave a damn about reality. It wasn’t a situation with (demented) idealists on one side and (prudent) realists on the other: everyone was equally deranged. And in the demonstrations that filled the streets, where one might expect the community spirit, the collective soul, to prevail, in reality everyone was fighting for themselves alone, shouting and marching for themselves, seized by the thrill of liberty, a delirious fever of the ego that lusted for its independence, its own enjoyment. Even those seized by a nostalgia for order and authority were shaken by the violent fever of individual initiative, the determination to triumph whatever the cost—be it one’s own life, or someone else’s. Everyone could afford the luxury of desires, but these individual desires were further fueled by shared actions. One mistreated oneself and others with the same indifference. Everyone was alone, facing off with the dizzying risk of “living life.”

Alone, and yet together with many others, lifted high on a collective wave. (The Catholics School)

But to come back to the elections: that was supposed to be the year of the Communists. The Communist Party was by far the leading party in Turin, Naples, Venice, in Emilia and in Tuscany. In certain cities, two thirds of the population voted Communist. The Communists even picked up votes in the ranks of the classes that communism had historically declared its determination to abolish, and perhaps those classes voted that way out of a subconscious desire to contribute to their own destruction and finally eliminate the mark of distinction that in other historic phases they had striven ruthlessly to attain. There was a bourgeoisie that defended tooth and nail the prerogatives acquired and a bourgeoisie that fought, at least to hear them tell it, against the regime that had hitherto always protected, coddled, spoiled, and cherished them. These two souls of the bourgeoisie, mirror images of each other, would soon come to a final reckoning. And that final reckoning was expected to come with these elections. When I talked, socialized, argued, made friends, made love, or went to the movies it was almost exclusively with Communists. Of various varieties and degrees, some of them authentic Communists, some less so, and a few who were unquestionable fakes, but all of them red, members of the PCI, the FGCI, Lotta Continua, Manifesto, PSIUP, Marxist-Leninists, anarcho-Communists (as we members of Collective M proclaimed ourselves), renegades of the extraparliamentary world, Trotskyites, adherents to the First, the Second, the Third, and the Fourth International, Socialists even farther to the left than the Communists themselves, and a vast number of so-called gruppettari, members of grouplets whose political militancy made explicit reference to movements that there is not enough space here to mention, so frequent were their schisms and reconciliations and breakaways and fragmentations, by the end of which there were increasingly extremist and sectarian formations. The only one that I’ll cite, if only for its exemplary name, and because the older sister of my first girlfriend was a militant in its ranks, was Serve the People. I, too, was a Communist to all intents and purposes, I was one even if maybe I wasn’t one, I hadn’t been before and I wouldn’t be afterward, I was one even though the ideas of communism failed to persuade me back then any more than they do now, that is to say, almost not at all, and their practical applications actually disgusted me, to the point that I could much more readily say that I’m an anti-Communist than a Communist. So how can an anti-Communist proclaim himself to be a Communist, and act and vote and even wade into brawls, feeling himself wholly to be one, and I mean sincerely, with full conviction—so I ask myself, how can that be? My sole anchor of salvation and my one way of scuttling out from the dilemma of that contradiction was, in any case, to proclaim that I was opposed to Stalin—whom I considered a criminal even then and have ever since, and one of the worst criminals ever to have existed on the face of the earth—and against the Stalinists, and in that way I managed to carve out a virtuous little niche for myself in that ocean of bloodthirsty events and behaviors. All the same, I already know that, no matter how hard I try, no matter how I explain it away, I’ll never be able to understand and justify the contradiction that deep down still drives me, even now that I’ve stopped rooting for one side, now that I’ve even given up voting, the contradiction that still sometimes drives me to take the positions of a free-market gentleman, and on other occasions unleashes within me the delight of being implacably, coldly Marxist. A disenchanted bard of the status quo ready to turn into an equally disenchanted analyst of man’s exploitation of his fellow man. How can that be? And yet it most assuredly is. For that matter, I exist, there’s no doubt about it. And I sway, back and forth. I hardly think I’m alone in this.

Perhaps the fact that I sway can be attributed to the profession of writing, which tends to make me adopt different positions from case to case, different ways of looking at things. It’s a collateral effect of this calling. Or else, perhaps, I chose this line of work precisely in order to afford myself the luxury of swaying, in order to encourage it, so that I could impersonate first this person, then that one, that idea …

Savor pineapple

And dine on pheasant

No future for you, bourgeois,

So hold on to the present! (The Catholic School)

Now, if I write about fascism for the next few pages, it’s because several of the protagonists of this book were Fascists, just as the entire quarter was basically Fascist in those years, and also because the Fascists were, in their way—though in the minority, and with highly contradictory attitudes—exemplary specimens of the period I’m writing about, as were for that matter their left-wing adversaries. Actually, though, it is true of the Fascists in an even more distinctive and interesting way, inasmuch as they were deeply anachronistic. That same feverish reaction to the new era that was being ushered in all over the world by left-wing movements became typical of those same years, and in its determination to oppose the advent of the left, practically a constant attribute of the period. By opposing the left, fascism often and eagerly took on its very semblance, though reversing it, distorting it, and deforming it so that it became even more radical than the left at its most radical. This is due to the intrinsically twofold nature of fascism, present from the start: fascism contains within it both repressive institution and impatient uprising, law and transgression, instinct for preservation and childish delight in dilapidating, dispersing, and wrecking the very sandcastles it so lately built … the cult of order united with the apex of anarchy. As pure aspiration, fascism is the virtual locus of unlimited enjoyment, absolute, perverse, and therefore impossible, hence maddening, a source of despair, and logically leading to the most rigid repression of that very same enjoyment. Its secret ideal would be the wildest and most uncontrolled promiscuity, whereas its concrete practice took the form of a coercive control over all and any deviancy. Like an image that is distorted in its reflection, thus unexpectedly bringing out its hidden features, invisible to the ordinary line of sight, it is precisely in fascism—obstinate, residual, but constantly seeking rebirth, tirelessly renewed—that we can best perceive the contradictory character of the era in which this story unfolds.

The main problem with fascism is that you can never be Fascist enough. You could always be more of a Fascist, you could even be more of a Fascist than Mussolini, more of a Nazi than Hitler. There’s a sort of frenzy that can never be satisfied, a boundary that is always being pushed forward. Like all mystiques, the Fascist mystique is bottomless. There is always someone who can criticize you for being lukewarm, totalitarian but not wholeheartedly totalitarian, loyal and trusting but not blindly so, fervent and daring but only by half, and if that someone is lacking, then the inner Fascist that can be found in every Fascist will interrogate himself.

---

On soil always ready to produce the bitter fruit of derision, fascism did nothing but sharpen the sense of vanity, the sheer vanity of any individual in the face of the potential stature of the hero, and cultivate a contemptuous attitude toward those who did not take part in this faith, those who failed to believe in it or even understand it. Therefore, the die-hard loyalists felt they were condemned from the very outset to a sterile martyrdom, which in the aftermath was bound to go unacknowledged, and in any case, a thousand times degraded with respect to the figures taken as paragons and venerated—ancient Romans, medieval knights, Vikings, patriots … while the unfaithful, the infidels, would always be the target of their scorn, because they had been incapable of grasping the depth, the boundless profundity of the Fascist faith, a blind faith, a faith precisely because it was blind, blind inasmuch as it was faith, deep and dark like a bottomless well, into which they let themselves fall, fall, fall.

The constituent unhappiness of fascism, its spleen, its deep-seated bitterness and negritude, all originate in and derive from this long-standing inadequacy in the face of the models, of the hyperbolic watchwords: and who will ever be so evil? so daring? so brainless? so passionate? so ruthless? Who will ever succeed in being sufficiently Nazi, if you stop to consider that the Nazi himself outstrips all conceivable monstrosity? There is no act sufficiently misguided, rash, cruel, obscene, megalomaniacal, arbitrary, or chivalrous to meet that requirement, to fully answer the call. They are all too petty, and they all burn out almost instantly in their accompanying meanness. They become wretched at having failed to achieve wretchedness on a grandiose scale. The only haven for this unfulfilled tension is madness. Planting bombs, crashing fatally on a motorcycle, liquidating yourself with heroin, murdering, devastating, shooting yourself in the head. They set out to become knights like Percival, and in short order they became common criminals, and for that matter, grimy two-bit criminals. The stature of the hero remains a mirage, a colossal shadow, not even coming close to heroism, and in the meantime taking on, to a caricatural degree, all the vices, the excesses, the brashness, the nefarious deeds. Like fleas on a dead horse.

---

The gratifying cult of annihilation: life gleams at its greatest splendor at the instant in which you suppress another’s existence, or when you accept without trembling the suppression of your own. Dying in order to become eternal in the cult of the dead: that is the horizon, the pure Fascist mystique, corroborated by countless historical and literary examples. The sacrifice must be witnessed, illustrated, celebrated with commemorations, to make sure it remains exemplary. In the collective Fascist imagination, the dead heroes are still present, more present than the living. To understand that fact, you need only take a stroll through the QT, still today, and read the graffiti on the walls, read the posters …

Legionaries, labarums, anthems, recitations: the QT is a notepad of fallen soldiers.

In those posters, the talk is of wolves and slaves, cowards and loyalty, death and noble blood: the language of ancient Nordic poems is borrowed, from Beowulf to the Eddas and the Nibelungenlied.

What can we acknowledge as an achievement of that culture? A certain graphic style, its extreme stylization, occasionally the ability to choose striking slogans or titles (like the title of the infamous French magazine Je suis partout, “I Am Everywhere,” which is certainly on a level with the finest avant-garde art of the twentieth century).

---

Their credo could be summarized in a single brief phrase: “Viva la morte!” Long live death! ¡Viva la muerte! For them, killing at random, a hail of killing, killing for none but the most futile of reasons, with no particular criterion but in an unquestionable fashion, was even more inebriating than to strike well-chosen targets with a specific political objective. Indeed, the political objective was, in fact, to have no objective, always to veer toward the gratuitous, because it is in gratuitous sacrifice (whether meted out or suffered, each amounting to practically the same thing) that fascism expressed its energy: the absence of any need to answer for its deeds, sovereign acts, which were in fact not open to discussion, redeemed from and uncontaminated by the leprosy of reason. Their most typical motive, the vendetta, almost never struck those directly responsible for the misdeeds they meant to retaliate against. Every action, every deed was justified by the mere fact of having been committed, and any action performed was in any case preferable to inaction. To succeed or to fail were seen as equivalent. WHAT PURPOSE DOES A SWORD SERVE IF IT REMAINS IN ITS SHEATH? WHAT USE IS IT UNLESS IT IS STAINED WITH BLOOD? If violence and death exist (and there is no doubt that they do), then why not exercise a preliminary right to inflict them, even if that exposes you to the risk of suffering them?

---

The specificity of fascism is that it is, as we say of certain diseases, aspecific, which means that it does not consist of the content of its ideology, but rather in the way it constructs around that ideology an action and an identity. It is not what you believe in that matters, but the fact itself that you believe it, the absolute conviction, not of something in particular, but of the very fact that you’re convinced of it. One is convinced of one’s own conviction, one has faith in one’s faith. The credo of the Fascist is not a doctrine or a specific political program, because a program is for tomorrow while the struggle is for today. You can therefore behave and think or speak like a Fascist without really being one. Exactly because that credo is a forma mentis, a way of thinking devoid of any specific content, or full of any given content in glaring contradiction with all others, it is therefore exceedingly difficult to refute and to abjure. One can, perhaps, abjure a faith per se, but not because its content has been shown to be false, since there never was any content in the first place, or if there was, it was interchangeable, revolution for reaction, defense of the bourgeoisie for overthrow of the bourgeoisie, cult of the past for impetus into the future, and so on (a fundamental difference between communism—which has a doctrine, and a substantial one, however gross and ham-handed and false one may judge it to be—and fascism).

The fact that fascism stubbornly defies definition can be sensed even in the difficulty any writer encounters in formulating statements about it that are anything other than slogans of exaltation, on the one hand, or insults and vitriol, on the other.

Fascism in fact constitutes the dilemma of unrepresentability: and perhaps for that very reason, incessantly, it loved to depict itself in whole, healthy forms …

---

Also interesting is the impudence, the extraordinary insolence that the Fascists show in proclaiming that they act in the name of injustice. It is by no means true that all political regimes claim to act justly, that they strive to reform society in order to obtain better conditions for those who live under them: in any case, here, to the contrary, they are openly fighting to establish a more unjust society, as unjust as is humanly possible, and they take this struggle as a point of honor.

The kinds of things Fascists used and did in those years:

They had a passion for snakes: they’d keep a python, or else a caiman, in the bathtub

Sharp-toed boots

Thor’s hammer

Rugby, Tolkien (before they made the movies), the Holy Grail (before The Da Vinci Code).

(There was a famous incident in which one of them—while the police were arresting him and beating him soundly, so soundly that he died of it—invoked the god Odin.)

---

The right and the left aren't symmetrical. In a society like Italy, in spite of appearances, they were almost always in the minority. It was their spectacular presence in the world of youth culture that made them seem stronger, which in politics, only rarely or only for brief intervals, is the same as actually being strong.

The political formula of the extreme right in the seventies: the left (that is, political aggression, revolutionary drive) minus humanism equals pure subversion.

No, there is no symmetry. The extreme right always felt it was superior to the traditional division between right and left (the so-called third position: NEITHER USA NOR USSR was the recurring graffiti on the walls of the QT). Neither right nor left, or else right and left together, as in the very definition of national socialism.

What drove them? Camaraderie, hatred for democracy, the myth of individual courage, scorn for the enemy, the cult of violence and death, pride and despair at being in the minority.

---

It is difficult to keep from considering the enemy to be a criminal. Reptiles, rats, cockroaches, the demented and the possessed, demons, wild animals, chimps: these are the figures that are often mentioned in the same breath as the enemy. “Fascists are not human. A snake is more human,” the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez rapturously declared, receiving vast approval.

If what reined in the radical thrust of historical fascism was the need for a compromise with the monarchy and the Church in order to govern, neofascism had none of those restraints, allowing its militants to cultivate a purely subversive dream, wild and free. But once again historical reality made sure there was a price to pay. The most extremist political action turned into its exact opposite, in the end. The militants murdered people, convinced that they were medieval knights, whereas at best they were serving as guardians of the established order. A fine paradox!

Terrorists on the left and terrorists on the right. The former were vying for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and they did everything they could think of to make sure the nightmare became reality. They failed in that effort, okay, but what about the latter, the right-wing terrorists? What was it they wanted? It’s not clear what project or utopia the terrorists on the right had in mind, if they had anything at all—and I’m limiting myself to the ones who weren’t being manipulated like puppets on strings by the intelligence services. Steeped in the myth of the hero, they killed or got themselves killed or wound up serving life sentences without parole in order to defend the future rights of matrons in the exclusive neighborhood of Collina Fleming to double park. They planted bombs in piazzas in order to make sure those bleached blondes could go to water aerobics classes. They spilled their blood to defend the status quo. The Parioli tennis club and the Maurizio Costanzo Show, a popular talk show. To make sure the Communists never got their claws on those precious legacies. They blew up trains and banks—for that.

---

Hence the rhetoric of “one day you’ll thank us.” We did time behind bars to save you from the Reds. More than the democratic state (which we hated), we defended the state of things.

Aside from their own legacy, there’s a great deal of the anarchist school (and further back, Christian rigorism) in the scorn for danger and death flaunted by the neo-Fascists. Their typically funereal tone derived from the very nature of their ideology, but to an even greater extent from their awareness of defeat, which therefore demands a sacrifice, unlike Christian ideology, devoid of hope, an end to itself, sterile.

---

A few days ago, I saw one of these killers on television, for the first time after thirty or so years behind bars. In the interview, concerning his past offenses, he spoke of heroism and the quest for a beautiful death. I have no reason to doubt he meant what he said, that is, that he was genuinely convinced of the things he claimed. The whole truth, though, is that the murders committed by those political groups were ambushes, laid for helpless or unprepared people, who were shot in the face and, even before they could understand by who and why, were dead. They called them by name to make them turn around, thus making certain they were shooting the right person. When you shoot someone in the face, you’re killing them, but more important, you’re deleting them. If an encounter with another person consists of the perception of their face, in the reciprocal acknowledgment of a certain humanity, then to devastate their features with a metal-coated projectile while their eyes meet yours deletes in an instant that option. At first, in front of you, you have an anonymous silhouette, and after you’ve pulled the trigger, there is no one: their face, their life has already been sucked into the void, and you can walk away.

---

Their objective was to turn peacetime into a disagreeable misunderstanding, a meaningless intermission. A lukewarm bath in which the hero only grows soft. Against this languid and pacific image—the struggle, the challenge, a stiffening defiance, a venturing beyond, a provocation … There are enemies in every camp and they must be flushed out: in politics, liberalism (even the Communists are more worthy of respect, almost admirable, because they, too, battle against the liberal), laxity in the field of education, Petrarchism in literature, faggotry in terms of customs and lifestyle—these are the enemies. It is necessary to bring war, and its mythical protagonist, the warrior, in peacetime. One must violate peace, useful only to merchants and shopkeepers, fertilize it. Protract a condition of war ad infinitum.

---

They fanatically supported any act capable of shattering the individual. They believed that by breaking a person, something new and superior would emerge, something authentic, savage, and pure. It was an idea naïve in its premise, crude in its implementation, nefarious in its consequences. Anything, anything at all, as long as it could be used to crack the shell of normality, conventional identity, in short, the habits that flatten man and render him stupid, when instead he should be reawakened, whatever it takes: you could do it with boxing, drugs, beatings, prayer, gunshots, workouts in the gym, choral singing, hiking, summer camps, anything. But then this same fragmented individual sooner or later would have to be reassembled, strengthened, given discipline: after mystically losing himself in the nothingness, he had to rediscover himself. “For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.”

The ideal moment to complete this sort of recruitment-training-indoctrination was between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. I mean, back in those days: nowadays that age would be too late, or maybe the effort would be wholly pointless: adolescents have countless distractions and it’s harder to focus their energies, I mean to say, to focus their energies in a single fanatical direction. The blindness of an adolescent of today may be very profound indeed, but it’s almost never total: that young person can be seduced and deceived, no doubt about it, but by many things at once, very rarely by just one. In the darkness of their cavern, many flames flicker and gutter, many illusory will-o’-the-wisps may dance, but it is unlikely that all at once the powerful floodlight of a supposed truth will switch on. So much the better, I believe. And here I’m talking once again about the males, that’s right, the males, the poor miserable males, miserable about the simple fact that they’re male and therefore foolishly proud and fond of their misery. The female readers of this book will, I hope, forgive me for the monotony if at least they’re able to recognize in the characters populating these pages some distant reflection of their fathers, brothers, male friends, sons, and those men they may have chanced to fall in love with and who seeded their lives with insecurity. A woman thinks that she’s found a bulwark, but instead it was a cabin with walls as thin as rice paper, or perhaps it was a castle, yes, but an illusion of a castle, a trick castle whose walls, as soon you turn your back, vanish in the blink of an eye.

---

While I took part in the political meetings on Via Spontini, with a couple of comrades outside on the lookout against possible Fascist incursions, I noticed how every twist of the discussion corresponded to a step in their radicalization. The line of reasoning would snap and then be resumed from a subsequent point that matched a higher level of virulence, exactly like a round of hands in poker, with each player seeing and raising the previous bets, so that with each hand the pot necessarily grows, and grows, the ante continuously piling up, richer and richer. A verbal risk is almost never associated with the actual risk, and that is how certain players tilt into bankruptcy without noticing. Betting a higher sum when you’re in the throes of vertigo, in the trance of total detachment from reality. More, more and more and more. Just for the giddy inebriation of that endless tailspin. The thread might have snapped at the sound of a mocking phrase, torn by an insult or a curse, or else by a paradox, which almost inevitably gets the better of all the arguments brought to bear. How so? By its sheer incongruity, which caught your interlocutor off guard, leaving him defenseless, at least temporarily, pawing helplessly at the air. By leaping from one verbal plane to another, you create a void into which your interlocutor—who was following you closely, marking you man-to-man, eager not to let you outdistance him—helplessly tumbles. It’s the best way to silence your adversary: leap from one topic to another, attack him on a level or a subject that has nothing to do with the matter at hand, passing from the rational plane to the emotional or the physical, both impossible to refute. Logic crumbles if contaminated by hatred or passion or ridicule, all that remains of its various delicate passages is a grid of threads burned to cinders, like Loki’s net. In a dispute, one theory can be opposed by another, one mental broadside can be met with a proportionate response, until someone throws the mechanism out of whack, tosses all the cards into the air. Until someone pulls out a whiff of folly, a handgun, a succession of absurd questions, low blows, flashes of genius, a beating, something unspeakable.

Superior to the philosopher who reasons (Hamlet) is the philosopher who does not reason (Nijinsky). (The Catholic School)

A further surreal effect burst loose yesterday evening on Via Benaco, as I was walking along, hands clasped behind my back, pondering who I ought to put in the next scene and how to give that person shape, and as I thought, I slowly entered the gallery of greenery, whereupon, raising my eyes, I realized that I had stepped into that famous painting by Magritte: under the vault of foliage it was already dark night, the bright yellow streetlamps casting shadows, a gloomy silence like some provincial city—while overhead, above the branches, you could still glimpse clear and luminous the sky of Rome, crisscrossed by darting swallows.

High above, there was still daylight.

On the ground, darkest night.

Sort of like in this story. Divided by a line where opposites meet, even though the canvas is the same, and so is the instant. Even the protagonists are the same, whether they act in the darkness or in the light of day. There, it is as if the light itself produces the darkness, as if its splendor engenders the darkness, and I’m certain that this contradiction in terms has some meaning of its own, that’s right, that it is prosperity itself that engenders malaise. I can’t find this meaning, I can’t find it on my own, I have to reach out to my memory and my imagination for help. You might say to me, what help are you looking for, whose help are you asking for, in that case? Whose help, if you are still the one, who remembers and invents. But the memory and the imagination aren’t mine, I’m not really me, the forces that come to my aid as often as not also abandon me. If they really were mine, they’d do as I say, wouldn’t they? Like a hand that reaches out to grasp a glass. Hand, grab that glass, and my hand grabs it. Lift it to my mouth. Tip it …

A thirst-slaking gulp of water.

I have no choice, though, but to hope that memory and imagination come to visit me, and I cannot expect anything certain, maneuverable, from them. I have begun to suspect that these are not two separate, distinct forces, recollection and fantasy, but rather a single force, and that the words come from the same spring, they are neither true nor are they false, neither authentic nor invented, there is just one voice that recounts and reasons, and I have no option but to listen to it. Trustingly. (The Catholic School)

Self-restraint, in fact, consists of the ability to resist, to master, to tame, to keep from giving in to vulgar or dangerous inclinations. Which can mean that once the levee breaks, there is no bottom, there are no more limits to the actions that take joy in the savage delight of being liberated … and by the sheer force of inertia continue their course without hindrance. Into the void. From rigid conformity to outright perversion, the distance is not only short, it can be a single step. You should further consider that pitiless and bullying acts, while they may sorely restrict the freedom of those upon whom they are inflicted, unleash the freedom of the person inflicting them. And they therefore constitute at the same time the maximum level of oppression and the maximum level of liberty, both coercion and unbridled freedom. There is no point in trying to resist the argument: rape and murder are liberatory, if viewed with the eyes of those who commit them. Perfect circularity between these two extremes is attained when those who have been oppressed by violence utilize it in their turn to achieve liberation: the joy of those who suddenly stop obeying, submitting, restraining themselves, being patient—and simply explode. Suffice it to think of the celebration of this turnaround that can be seen in countless revenge films, of which the founding father remains Straw Dogs, where the professor, the civilized man who has been the victim of mistreatment, suddenly reverses the situation by making use of the same violence that was used against him, but amplified tenfold by his frustration and brilliant mind. Malevolent energy concealed behind the screen of good manners. (The Catholic School)

The next day it would be my turn to say confession. I saw it as a sort of test I would have to take, and I wondered if I would be fully prepared for it. As long as it was a matter of repeating lessons you’d heard in class or things you’d read in a book … but the things you’re supposed to confess aren’t written down anywhere. They were going to have to come out of me, out of my soul, and what’s more, they were bad things, nasty and filthy, my sins.

Whichever way it goes, you come out looking pretty bad. If you were to confess little or nothing, it might seem you were trying to conceal your wicked deeds (which in fact amounts to one more wicked deed), or else it must mean that you are such a good person—but I mean so full of sweetness and light—that you had nothing to tell the father confessor, in other words, a disgusting little angel.

To me, the intimacy required to tell someone else the harm I had done was inaccessible. You can conceal it, the harm, you can invent it, exaggerate it, or attenuate it … but you can never say it.

[...] 

As long as I went to confession and said confession, it remained a genuine torture for me. I was sincere but, at the same time, I lied, and though I was sure I’d told the truth, at the end of confession, it seemed to me that I hadn’t told the truth at all, both because the sins confessed weren’t true, and because I had kept the real ones carefully hidden. I thought that I’d forgotten to mention important things, wrongs I’d committed that were far more serious than those I’d confessed, even though when I stopped to think about it, none actually came to mind. Or else I have the even more sinister sensation that I had soft-pedaled my sins, telling them in such a way that I came out looking good, so that when all was said and done I got away scot-free, I practically deserved to be congratulated, if not for having committed them, at least for having recounted them so very nicely. Too nicely, in other words, like Rousseau and his Confessions, which of course I hadn’t read at that age but in which I’d later recognize a reflection of myself, make no mistake, not for the spiritual greatness and breadth of thought, unequaled and unattainable, but rather for the pervasive hypocrisy, about which there could be no doubt. But my greatest remorse came from the awareness that I had by no means actually repented, that is, that the repentance declared at the end of confession was in no way genuine. A convention to be respected, a formula to be recited. I only had one real regret—that I felt nothing. Nothing at all. No authentic repentance nor any impulse to make a new resolution or deep emotion or a vow to give something up. I wasn’t ashamed, exactly, but neither was I proud of the wrong I had done, the way one may feel when one is truly wicked.

I felt insincere, whatever I might say or refrain from saying. My remorse was never authentic or spontaneous, my contrition was always contrived, copied from some other model, from something I’d read or heard or seen, just like so many other behaviors in my life, truth be told, that I adopted simply out of imitation, like a talented calligrapher, without ever feeling them wholeheartedly as my own for even a fleeting instant, without believing in them or, rather, believing that it was best, all things considered, to act that way, because that’s just the way people act, because it’s required of you, because that’s what others do, because everyone else expected it of me. This is a more than adequate reason to go along: the problem is that slight feeling of being out of phase, that instant of detachment. My confession was like a song being lip-synched, with the background music playing and the lips moving as you pretend to sing, but all it takes is the slightest hitch in the timing and the fakery is revealed on the singer’s face. Confession was, for me, the utmost moment of artificiality, that is, of distance not between what I was saying and what I was thinking, but rather between what I was saying and what I was feeling. And that, I am sorry to say, was nothing at all.

And then there was that morbid certainty of having forgotten perhaps the only real sin that was worth bothering to confess and expiate. Sincerity, courage, memory: zero. Exactly what this great buried sin might be never came to mind, no matter how hard I tried. It was there, of that I felt certain, but it remained out of my reach. (The Catholic School)

As little children and then as boys and young men, we were full of doubts of a legalistic nature. Do we or don’t we? Are we allowed to? And under what conditions? What were the terms established, the oaths sworn? Isn’t this a bizarre miracle—that something prohibited should suddenly become licit? Why? Isn’t it perhaps unjust that that which is unjust should suddenly become just? Schedules, quantities, measurements, very precise calculations, boundaries not to be transgressed. As far as the gate, only up to the sign that says DANGER, no later than eight o’clock, not before meals, be back in an hour. Even games are made up of prohibitions. The observance of every commandment ends up giving more importance to the rules as such, than to the reasons those rules were established. The prohibition against going swimming after a meal is an obvious and generic precaution, but if you give it an exact duration (when I was a kid, no less than three hours! You couldn’t go swimming for three hours after eating, which in our imagination meant that if you dove into the water two hours and fifty-nine minutes after polishing off a panino, you’d die the minute you hit the water…), when you draw an exact line, then all the forces are marshaled on one side and the other, like two armies lined up in battle, the forces of good and evil. Children are the most inflexible custodians of the given promise, of the geometry of prohibitions, and when they break their word or a prohibition, it’s out of either extreme courage or desperation, never out of solid good sense, they never think, “Oh, come on, how much will it really matter…” the way adults do. There’s no adjustment possible in the mind of a child. Home before dark, is that clear? All right, Mamma, but dark, exactly … when does dark begin?

With holy mass, the same thing happened. I had more scruples than an elderly Pharisee, and if I had been born an Orthodox Jew or a fundamentalist Muslim or any other of those many faiths brimming over with rules and prescriptions telling you that you must take care how you walk, when you breathe, what you drink, watch, and eat, which hand you use and which hat you wear and how many times you wash, painstakingly attentive to the smallest actions that are all regulated from the very outset, I think I would have been perfectly at my ease, ahhh, life would have been prescribed and guided minute by minute according to the observance of the laws, like a ticking clock, calmly, ineluctably, and once you’ve respected those rules you’re all good, no one can say a thing to you. You’re safe. You’ve paid in advance. The sternest law works this way, so that the very fact that you’ve observed it constitutes punishment enough. You punish yourself by obeying it.

The problem, though, is that little by little the moral core of the law begins to escape you, and you limit yourself to doing the basic minimum necessary to respect it, not a gram, not a lira, not a second, not a genuflection more than is strictly required. The rule is reduced to bone, worn shiny from being gnawed. Done! you can say to yourself once you’ve observed the precept. Done with that, now, too!

When I found out that a mass was valid once you reached the Our Father, then there was no way I was going to attend the whole service. Never. I split the second to make sure I got there just in time for the eucharistic liturgy after I discovered that that was all it took. (The Catholic School)

 Confession is a sacrament that may be even harder to understand than the eucharist—when you’re ten years old. He would ask me what sins I’d committed and I didn’t know what to answer. I would have been glad to accuse myself, in utter seriousness, of something very bad, but I searched and searched, almost desperately rummaged and struggled to feel a powerful sentiment of remorse, and nothing came to mind except for trifles and the desire to be done with it: I was, as so often happens to me, deeply moved and at the same time bored and impatient, and so I replied to Father Saturnino that I’d told lies … and then, that I’d disobeyed … disobeyed Mamma: but even that was half a lie, since I was an obedient child. Still, I was ashamed to have so little to confess and, therefore, little of which to repent; I really was embarrassed, not of my sins, but rather of their paltry number and negligible nature, and as a result I wished I could invent a few more, to make a more interesting sinner of myself, one more deserving of forgiveness, a prodigal son. I had understood that the more you sin, the greater the joy your repentance will cause. Indeed, to use the language of the religious, the greater the jubilation.

This blessed rule stupefied me then as it does now and should be classed among the things whose spiritual grandeur I am able to intuit, but it is in fact that very grandeur that upsets and irritates me, undermining my very sense of justice. This would happen to me many times in the years that followed, when I saw men of the cloth so impassioned in their devotion to sinners that they made them their pets, almost their fair-haired boys: repentant terrorists, bank robbers who have turned to painting Madonnas, murderers who, in the end, seem almost to be better people than their innocent victims, seeing that, by choosing goodness after committing so much evil, they’ve helped to shift the scales in which the world’s good and evil are weighed, because if they stop their killing, then the dish of the scale that holds evil will in fact become that much lighter. I once thought of a way to win the Nobel Peace Prize: one sure method would be to become a terrorist, plant bombs and blow up airplanes, etc., and then at a certain point, decide to give up my wicked ways and lay down my arms and, in this exact manner, become to all intents and purposes a peacemaker, a man of peace.

Victims don’t stir the same passions as a rogue redeemed, that much is obvious.

I sincerely wanted to attain redemption but I didn’t know what from, so Father Saturnino came to my aid, convinced that I was ashamed to confess my sins, while I was actually struggling with a shame of the exact opposite hue; and just as good-hearted teachers do during an oral exam, when they see that a student is having difficulty, it was he who suggested to me a few of the sins I might have committed: and even if it wasn’t true or I didn’t begin to understand what the specific sin might be, I hurried to answer yes, yes, to each of his questions, yes, I did that, as if I thought that in order to obtain that blessed pardon I needed to reach a certain quota, a predetermined scorecard of evil, so that I could reset that number to zero and start over, as in the card game of sette e mezzo or blackjack, or a loyalty program at a gas station.

And I remember very clearly just what the last sin was that Father Saturnino suggested I go and rummage around in my memory for, just in case I might have committed that one, too.

“Have you ever watched dirty movies?”

“What?”

“Dirty movies.”

This time I hesitated to answer yes, because I really didn’t know what the brother was talking about. Dirty movies? Was he possibly talking about … pornographic films? That couldn’t be. I was ten years old. It wasn’t like now, when a kid can go on the Internet and watch people having sex, or threesomes, or group sex, rapes, and orgies. Again this time, when the wise brother saw me hesitate, he decided to help me out.

“You know what I mean, don’t you? Movies with undressed women.”

Just the mere word “undressed” made me blush violently. I’d never seen undressed women, in the movies much less in real life, if you leave aside a certain episode from my childhood that I may perhaps tell you about later on. And so, deciding that enough was enough, that I’d confessed to enough sins to give an image of myself as a sufficiently wicked Candlewick, I was about to say no, when the father confessor specified: “Like, Double O Seven movies.”

Secret agent 007. Bond. James Bond. And I had seen at least a couple of those movies, back then, Goldfinger for sure, and maybe Thunderball, but the women were never actually nude, when they took off their bras or when 007 unhooked them, they always had their backs to the camera, and even when they let their robes fall to the ground, the only thing you saw was their shoulders. Yes, in effect, I found those movies very unsettling, the brother had hit a bull’s-eye. And in Goldfinger I remember that there was a girl completely naked, dead on a bed and covered from head to foot in gold, painted gold … (The Catholic School)

We were all eager to spend time together but at the same time we were terrified at the idea of opening up, revealing the truth about ourselves. Pranks and crude jokes were the best way we had to conceal our inner life, drowning it in a vulgar laugh that was always slightly awkward and embarrassed and defensive. It was in fact much simpler to show off your penis in the locker room after gym class by swinging it like a lasso than to display any other undefended part of your personality. The crudeness cauterized wounds or prevented them from being inflicted. Sports were the ideal activity for this purpose, they allowed us to spend time together without obliging anyone to open up in any real way. In fact, by playing sports with our classmates and pals, we developed a supermuscle of control. In order to protect ourselves from the risk of potential confessions (the kind of stuff you’d expect from young ladies), we preferred to do things instead of talking about them, and in sports there’s next to no chitchat at all, a game is the kind of thing that after an hour and a half or two hours of insane intensity, thank heavens, comes to an end, so that you’ve given your all without actually giving anything specific or useful, the most burning commitment over the shortest period of time—and in fact it has many things in common with sex. That is, it allows you to emerge still virgin and uncontaminated. Risking your physical safety in sports ensures that you preserve your psychological safety. Male locker-room camaraderie, in other words, has very little in common with intimacy; instead it’s something midway between vaudeville, with its rat-a-tat volley of gags and bullshit, a lineup of suspects, and a conference table surrounded by generals with maps and charts before or after a battle. The things that are said there have the muscular character of an exhibition, and the rhythm of a variety show.

Unfortunately, true intimacy doesn’t exist in a partial or moderate form: it’s always, by its very definition, excessive. Made up of vertical lunges. Contaminating, like saliva in French kisses. That’s why we feared it, because we dimly sensed that you can never quite recover from contact with it, you can no longer veil what has once been unveiled.

Rather than opening up to your pals, then, it was necessary to conquer them, or, at least, stand up to them. Hold your own in public in such a way as to avoid being riddled with indiscreet questions. What it required were such gifts as a powerful or strident voice, the capacity to tell jokes and anecdotes (a good memory was fundamental if you wanted to keep stock of your repertory), quick repartee so that you could offer a clever or filthy riposte to any mockery, the ability to lay your audience low in helpless laughter or else make them shut their mouths with a sharp glare. What’s more, sports, as practiced intensively at SLM, were a reasonably effective bulwark against the threat of girls, or at least the thought of them, seeing that there weren’t any in the surrounding area. The only individual of the female gender in the entire school, as I’ve previously mentioned, was a woman who sold pizza at recess. Still, even a vague thought can be every bit as unsettling as a physical presence and, in some cases, even more intrusive. I, for one, can say that I’ve never felt females to be so incredibly close to me as the times that all I saw on all sides were other males: in my years at SLM, during my mandatory stint in the army, and in prison, I could easily swear that they were physically present, that’s just how close I felt them, intensely close, upon me, inside me. It’s like the old joke about the guy who goes to the doctor, claiming that he’s a hermaphrodite; “What are you saying, are you sure of this?” the doctor replies. “Let me take a look…” Then, after an examination, the doctor reassures him: “Trust me, you’re fully male, perfectly normal…” “No, doctor, the thing is,” the guy insists, in desperation, “I have a pussy, more than one in fact, right here!”—and he slaps his hand against his forehead.

Nothing remained to us, in other words, but mental projections that we’d try to exorcise with chaotic basketball games, hikes, push-ups on wooden handles, kicking balls back and forth on dusty red fields, raising long trailing clouds behind us with every galloping charge, like in the cartoons with the racing ostrich. Some went so far as to try heading a seven-pound medicine ball. With actual flesh-and-blood girls, in any case, we wouldn’t have begun to know what to do, what to say, it was an unknown ritual, one that most of us would learn, if anything, by testing out and rehearsing an array of phrases and acts borrowed from our older brothers like good suits, but only after we’d graduated. Once we were expelled into the real world. Only a mechanically applied ceremonial protocol would allow us to get over the shyness we’d accumulated over years of dress rehearsals.

People can’t begin to imagine what a fragile fabric male shyness is, they never seem to make the effort, except perhaps to make fun of it. And they never consider, even more than the stumbling block of shyness itself, just how mortifying it is to have to make recourse to various stratagems to find one’s way out of it: in pathetic little vignettes, the movies and TV have retailed the tryouts, a boy in front of a mirror rehearsing his lines, as he plans to invite a girl to dance, the declarations of love uttered to one’s own image in the mirror by gawky guys who then shut their eyes and wrap their arms around their own shoulders and kiss themselves, but all this is strictly to get a laugh out of the audience, while male shyness really does have a dark, morbid side, demented and mad, which can lead variously to murder and suicide, forget about sophomoric comedies with Jack Lemmon or Adam Sandler! When you feel as if you’re being strangled … that the air won’t reach your lungs … and a devastating wave of desire rises to the verge of an anxiety attack, and yet it still can’t breach the levee and transform itself into action. You don’t lift a finger. Your voice dies in your throat. And she impatiently turns away, walks across the room, starts talking to other boys …

Even idiotic pranks like taking a classmate’s underwear, left in the locker room during swim lessons, and drenching them thoroughly (this was a trick played frequently on Arbus, and I confess that a couple of times I myself was a member of the gang of pranksters), played a role in this process of negotiation. These were moves on the chessboard of our identities, constantly under construction. In this way, we negotiated the fear of being taken for faggots. We negotiated the desire, however small or large that desire might be, to be faggots without letting it be seen. We negotiated the rank that we were to be given in the hierarchy, where the classmate forced to wring out his sopping underwear was dropped a level or two, and if subjected sufficiently to cruel leg-pulling and ass-kicking, might sink to the very bottom of the barrel, and even remain there, a permanent pariah. To become the target of ridicule, in fact, constituted our greatest fear, a fear that we negotiated with ourselves, each of us splitting into a dual personality, at once victim and agent of the same persecution, to see which of the two personalities would be the first to collapse, the faggot within me or the real man? The serial killer or the naked girl in the shower? When you’re an adolescent, it’s impossible not to be both things at once. We negotiated our way through that rising tide of pointless, vulgar words and a barricade of rude and repetitive gestures pushed well beyond the bounds of the absurd (pinches, knuckle-grinders, nape-smacks, accompanied by shrill whistles and neighing, goat-nips and donkey-chomps, soldier-slaps, unannounced smacks to the testicles), struggling the whole time with our aggressivity. Put like that, I wouldn’t be able to say whether we tamed those aggressive impulses or became enslaved to them like so many robots.

Since all of us were equally revolted by the thought of playing the part of the victim, we had to study, like so many would-be professional executioners, how to lop off a head, hurrying feverishly lest our own head be lopped off first. Honestly, I never really believed in even a tenth of the jerky wisecracks or extravagant boasting I spouted back then, in retaliation to those spouted by my pals and classmates, and I’m not saying that I realize that only now: I already knew it at the time. And yet, like so many others, aspiring as I did to be like everybody else and, when it came right down to it, succeeding—I said those things. I spouted them. Well, what’s so bad about that? You were in trouble if you missed a chance to make a rhyme with words ending in “-ock” or “-ucker” or “-ussy” or “-unt.” They just made your mouth itch at the chance. We also negotiated these succulent opportunities to show off our poetic or creative sides. To show some wit—wit, which delights in whistling through obscenities. Though none of us were born to the working classes, the low humor of our filthy nursery rhymes challenged the finest creations of an age-old tradition, in general, and Roman tradition, in particular, based on long, filthy lists and a ruthless vision of life, a cavalcade of cynicism and ass-fucking.

But foul language made us feel like good kids. Why not, a genuine community of good kids. It’s often said of people with dubious reputations, even of criminals, that deep down they’re good kids. If you scratch the surface, deep down you’ll find a good kid. What is it exactly that makes a young man a “good kid”? What are we talking about? About someone who’s always loyal to his buddies and ready to do what they’re willing to do without hesitation, to follow them anywhere, even when we’re talking about deplorable deeds, because if he tried to pull out at the last minute, then what kind of a buddy would he be, what would be so good, after all, about this good kid? A man is judged by the things he does, not by the things he says, so if someone doesn’t happen to get the chance to show what he’s capable of, he runs the risk of remaining a child, in the sedentary society we live in, stingy as it is with special moments. That’s why sports were invented, that is, a rapid succession of acid tests that can be administered two or three times a week, even at school, without having to wait for a war to break out or an apartment building to catch on fire in order to test those who are involved, to test their courage, their emotional control, and their willingness to endure pain. With the fairly pedestrian excuse of physical exercise, improving their posture, etc.: and at SLM they’d understood all this perfectly, to the point that they outfitted the school with a very modern gymnasium, and a pool where half of the Quartiere Trieste now splashes and swims (we’ll talk about that later on), as well as a sports center with basketball courts and soccer fields on Via Nomentana, where every afternoon buses full of shouting kids would pull up, and then leave several hours later full of the same kids, but now exhausted. We’d return from that sports center so sweaty and weary that often, in the winter, when night fell early and Via Nomentana was jammed with traffic, we’d fall asleep, dusty heads leaning together. Maybe males can establish relationships only in the midst of raging battle, so they re-create that condition on the playing fields. (The Catholic School)

Anyone who as a boy belongs to the middle class doesn’t even notice the fact, in part because the privileges he enjoys or the privations he suffers aren’t really all that spectacular, in the final analysis; he hardly even imagines that he can qualify as a “bourgeois young man”: when he looks in the mirror he sees a young man, not a “bourgeois young man,” even though that’s exactly what he is and how he actually appears, even when he’s in his underwear he’s a bourgeois young man in his underwear, lifting weights to develop his arm muscles, in front of the mirror in the bathroom of a bourgeois home, etc. But he doesn’t perceive himself that way, at age fifteen or sixteen he hardly thinks that belonging to a class is significant, and most of all he really doesn’t think of himself as belonging to a social class, if anything he might consider the soccer team he roots for, the music that he likes or detests, the way he dresses, or his political beliefs, which, in the case of a middle-class young man, could vary from the extreme right wing to the extreme left without either option seeming odd.

A borgataro from the poorer outskirts of town or an heir to a fortune or the scion of an aristocratic family almost immediately realize who they are and where they come from and where they’re heading or risk heading: the markers along the highways of their lives.

The young bourgeois man, on the other hand, will all at once perceive, on a given day that is as likely to come at age eighteen as at age thirty or forty, the class he belongs to, and in a flash it will become just as evident to his eyes that his clothing, his home, his motorcycle or his car, his very thoughts and desires and the way he has of relishing life or suffering, and even the sweetheart he has chosen or who has chosen him and who might well now be his wife, and have been for some time—all these things are the way they are precisely because he is bourgeois.

From that moment on, no matter what he might be doing, even organizing a picnic or signing an insurance policy or kissing a woman who might or might not be his wife, he’ll be possessed by that awareness. (The Catholic School)

We had a destructive and self-destructive attitude. Self-destruction was the science we knew best, the discipline that we practiced most assiduously. Even those who studied seriously or attended a gym on a regular basis, and thus seemed to be interested in strengthening their mind or their body, would end up distorting them both, generating maniacal thoughts or bowing themselves down under a heavy blanket of muscles. There seemed to be only two paths: either reject all exercise, or else take it to a fanatical extreme. Whichever path you took, the result was unharmonious.

We were out to conquer the world, or actually, the universe, but before doing that, we had to beat the closest adversary, even if it was just at a game of cards: there, your deskmate, that’s who you had to defeat, destroy him—but at the same time, help him. That’s what they taught us at SLM. The weakest must be defeated and, at the same time, helped.

It’s the same contradiction we encounter so frequently these days in politicians’ speeches, when in the same breath they claim to be fighting “for a meritocracy,” but also to ensure that “no citizen is left behind,” when it’s plain as day that the first thing excludes the second. (The Catholic School)

As little children and then as boys and young men, we were full of doubts of a legalistic nature. Do we or don’t we? Are we allowed to? And under what conditions? What were the terms established, the oaths sworn? Isn’t this a bizarre miracle—that something prohibited should suddenly become licit? Why? Isn’t it perhaps unjust that that which is unjust should suddenly become just? Schedules, quantities, measurements, very precise calculations, boundaries not to be transgressed. As far as the gate, only up to the sign that says DANGER, no later than eight o’clock, not before meals, be back in an hour. Even games are made up of prohibitions. The observance of every commandment ends up giving more importance to the rules as such, than to the reasons those rules were established. The prohibition against going swimming after a meal is an obvious and generic precaution, but if you give it an exact duration (when I was a kid, no less than three hours! You couldn’t go swimming for three hours after eating, which in our imagination meant that if you dove into the water two hours and fifty-nine minutes after polishing off a panino, you’d die the minute you hit the water…), when you draw an exact line, then all the forces are marshaled on one side and the other, like two armies lined up in battle, the forces of good and evil. Children are the most inflexible custodians of the given promise, of the geometry of prohibitions, and when they break their word or a prohibition, it’s out of either extreme courage or desperation, never out of solid good sense, they never think, “Oh, come on, how much will it really matter…” the way adults do. There’s no adjustment possible in the mind of a child. Home before dark, is that clear? All right, Mamma, but dark, exactly … when does dark begin?

With holy mass, the same thing happened. I had more scruples than an elderly Pharisee, and if I had been born an Orthodox Jew or a fundamentalist Muslim or any other of those many faiths brimming over with rules and prescriptions telling you that you must take care how you walk, when you breathe, what you drink, watch, and eat, which hand you use and which hat you wear and how many times you wash, painstakingly attentive to the smallest actions that are all regulated from the very outset, I think I would have been perfectly at my ease, ahhh, life would have been prescribed and guided minute by minute according to the observance of the laws, like a ticking clock, calmly, ineluctably, and once you’ve respected those rules you’re all good, no one can say a thing to you. You’re safe. You’ve paid in advance. The sternest law works this way, so that the very fact that you’ve observed it constitutes punishment enough. You punish yourself by obeying it.

The problem, though, is that little by little the moral core of the law begins to escape you, and you limit yourself to doing the basic minimum necessary to respect it, not a gram, not a lira, not a second, not a genuflection more than is strictly required. The rule is reduced to bone, worn shiny from being gnawed. Done! you can say to yourself once you’ve observed the precept. Done with that, now, too!

When I found out that a mass was valid once you reached the Our Father, then there was no way I was going to attend the whole service. Never. I split the second to make sure I got there just in time for the eucharistic liturgy after I discovered that that was all it took. (The Catholic School)