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.

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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.

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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).

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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?

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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 …

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)