Essayists From Italy

"And this little volume dedicated to the rustic Davos of a handful of sick people should be placed in a particular light - and in part of failures - who maintain their precarious health in this Zauberberg of the frontier infested with rattlesnakes and poisonous herbs. A light that allows us to grasp that stylistic maturity that is on the verge of germinating in the freedom of invention, of definitively freeing itself from the last constraints of a personal experience and the residues of a long, exhausting internship."

"they laughed a little and were very friendly together, the three of them, Anna, Emanuele and Giustino; and they were pleased to be together, the three of them, thinking of all those who were dead, and of the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion, and of the long, difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do.”"

"The novels and essays of Natalia Ginzburg (among them, The Manzoni Family and The Little Virtues) address both her Sephardic ancestry and her leftist political philosophy."

"(prompt: "The book that changed my life") I was well into my 30s when I read The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg and as soon as I began I felt myself deeply connected. It isn’t that it’s the greatest book in the world, but for me it was vital. I felt she was showing me the type of writer I had it in me to be. One of the essays – “My Vocation” – really hit the nail on the head. I identified profoundly with the way in which Ginzburg traced her own development as a nonfiction writer. It made me realise that it was only through this kind of writing I could employ my own storytelling gifts. I reread it irregularly but quite a lot, and I’m always amazed by what she is able to accomplish with the small personal essay."

"if we ourselves have a vocation, if we have not betrayed it, if over the years we have continued to love it, to serve it passionately, we are able to keep all sense of ownership out of our love for our children. But if on the other hand we do not have a vocation, or if we have abandoned it or betrayed it out of cynicism or a fear of life, or because of mistaken parental love, or because of some little virtue that exists within us, then we cling to our children as a shipwrecked mariner clings to a tree trunk."

"Our dreams are never realized and as soon as we see them betrayed we realize that the intensest joys of our life have nothing to do with reality. No sooner do we see them betrayed than we are consumed with regret for the time when they glowed within us. And in this succession of hopes and regrets our life slips by."

"He knew how to find time to study and to write, to earn his living and to wander idly through the streets he loved; whereas we, who staggered from laziness to frantic activity and back again, wasted our time trying to decide whether we were lazy or industrious"

"Human relationships have to be rediscovered every day. We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbor is a human action and so it is always evil or good, true or deceitful, a kindness or a sin."

"What we must remember above all in the education of our children is that their love of life should never weaken."

"When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn't matter much to me. Only, I don't want to think about names: I can see that if I am asked 'a small writer like who?' it would sadden me to think of the names of other small writers. I prefer to think that no one has ever been like me, however small, however much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be. The important thing is to be convinced that this really is your vocation, your profession, something you will do all your life."

"what a job of ants and horses translation is. (PB: Ants and horses?) NG: One has to be as exact and industrious as an ant and have the impetus, the strength, of a horse to pull ahead."

"A journalist recently said in the newspapers that writers should keep their mouths shut as much as possible and I think he was probably right. Better to write than to speak."

"(PB: You wrote your essay “The Little Virtues” a long time ago, really in another age. A number of American readers are very much taken with the piece while finding it a direct challenge to their familiar assumptions. Would you still offer parents the same advice with regard to the upbringing of their children or have your thoughts changed?) NG: I’m sure that I would write exactly the same thing; even in these difficult times one should only teach the big virtues, generosity more than anything else. The rest can be learned later on."

"Every time I sit down to write a book I feel that I have to start from zero, that I have to re-learn how to write."

"I believe the family to be terribly important, even when it is obsessive or repressive or full of insidious germs which can pollute life. But it’s a necessary institution, a way in which children become adults, for which there’s no substitute."

"unfortunately, a great number of judges and social workers are rigidly unable to judge cases in a human way."

"for a mistake, my God, you don’t make a child suffer!"

"My Jewish identity became extremely important to me from the moment the Jews began to be persecuted. At that point I became aware of myself as a Jew. But I came from a mixed marriage—my father was Jewish, my mother Catholic. My parents were atheists and therefore chose not to give us, the children, any religious instruction. They were totally non-observant. You might say that a Hebrew spirit dominated the household in the sense that my father had a very strong, very authoritarian character. And I suppose it’s true that many of the family friends were Jews, but many were not. So, while I did not have any sort of formal Jewish upbringing, I nevertheless felt my Jewishness very acutely during the war years (my first husband, Leone Ginzburg, was a Jew) and after the war, when it became known what had been done to the Jews in the camps by the Nazis. Suddenly my Jewishness became very important to me."

"in my own work...there’s an important sense of the visual, of the visualized. I see it all so vividly. It’s not that I don’t see what I imagine. If I don’t see it then I can’t write anything."

"Style is not something that can be improvised: one has to construct it, to make it."

"(there must have been other writers whom you regarded as models.) NG: In my adolescence, the Russians were tremendously important to me. More than anyone, Chekhov. Of the Italians, Svevo, the Moravia of Gli Indifferenti. When I started writing these were the writers I kept before me."

"I’m not really a poet. It’s only once in a while that what I have to say seems to find its best expression in a poem. But I do read a number of poets—Montale, Sandro Penna, Sabba."

"dialect is really impossible to translate adequately."

"(Are there other English language writers who mean a lot to you?) NG: Well, of course, Shakespeare. And I love George Eliot as well. I’ve read the major authors, but in Italian, not English. Perhaps my favorite English novelist is Jane Austen. I hardly know contemporary American literature. The two American authors I love most, who are by now dead, alas, are Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. And then I love Fitzgerald and Hemingway—especially the Hemingway of the stories...When Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology came out in Italian, suddenly there was widespread interest in North American writing. But even before that Pavese was busy introducing us all to the great American writers."

"Groups? Movements? I don’t really think these groups exist. I don’t think in Italy there even are such things as currents or trends. The whole scene is really much too chaotic for such groups to form and stay together as separate entities."

"But it was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart."

"Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was a way fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exaltation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water."

"The time has now come for choices between a messianism that keeps hope alive, which kindles the Jews by motivating them daily to efforts and sacrifices, such as the building of a culture which is adapted to a better society – not the best that utopian fantasy can imagine – and a messianism that is only a camoflauge for intransigent politics, which finds its very best allies in the fundamentalists of the Arab-Islamic world, who are its mirror image."

"In order to uproot all spirit of opposition I believe it is fundamental to implement a broad educational endeavor, because certain prejudices of the Western world cannot be addressed in a few hours."

"Exhilarated by his 'discovery', Darwin jotted down these sentences: 'Origin of man now proven. Metaphysics must flourish. Anyone who understood the baboon would do more for metaphysics than Locke did." Darwinian metaphysics placed all wickedness, all cruelty, all evil at its origins, in the bestial. Carrying this thought to extreme consequences which are certainly not Christian, Darwin placed the Devil at the origin, he made man a redeemed demon. "The origin of our kind," he wrote, "is the cause of our evil passions! The Devil in the form of a Baboon is our grandfather." This doctrine was cultivated and developed by Darwin's cousin, the great statistician Francis Galton. [...] «The sense of original sin» he wrote in 1865 «would not demonstrate, according to my theory, that man has fallen from a superior condition, but rather that he is rapidly recovering from an inferior one»."

"Have you ever stopped to see seagulls suspended in the wind? If all beings on earth disappeared and only the seagulls remained, and maybe the little fish for their food, perhaps you think that from the seagulls, with the passing of millions of years, the animals that inhabit the earth and also man and perhaps even the frogs, butterflies and minnows? And even if the seagulls disappeared, can you imagine that the little fish of the sea, through gradual transformations, would give rise, at the end of time, to new seagulls or in any case to some new kind of sea bird capable of hovering in the air?"

"No form (including man) is [...] a form derived or improved with respect to some "primitive" progenitor. Man does not derive from primates (in the same way that birds do not derive from reptiles) except in the deceptive sense in which any form can be considered derived "from" the larger group to which it belongs. […] We have given names to the pre-human forms. We called them man-apes, subhumans, or brutes. But did they ever exist, or rather don't they belong to a mythology that has now disappeared?"

"I, who don't believe in war, don't want to be buried under any flag. If anything I would like to be remembered for my dreams. Should I die one day - in a hundred years - I would like to have what Nelson Mandela said on my gravestone: "A winner is a dreamer who has never stopped dreaming". Vittorio Arrigoni: a winner."

"Please, someone stop this nightmare. Choosing to remain silent means somehow lends support to the genocide unfolding right now. Shout out your indignation, in every capital of the 'civilised' world, in every city, in every square, covering our own screams of pain and terror. A slice of humanity is dying while pitifully listening out for a response."

"The 'civilized' world's silence is more deafening than the exlopsions covering the city like a shroud of death and terror."

"They will make a desert and call it peace."

"Stay human."

"We will continue to make poems out of our lives, until freedom is declaimed above the broken chains of all oppressed peoples."

"Knowing is the first step towards a solution."

"Justice and human rights cannot be selective."

"In the end, even if history has some bad pupils, it somehow teaches."

"[Referring to Israeli-Palestinian conflict] I knew I was coming to see terrible things, but not such terrible things."

"I don't believe in borders, barriers, flags. I believe that we all belong, regardless of latitudes and longitudes, to the same family, which is the human family."

"I believe there are different types of resistance, there is an armed resistance and there is another resistance: a civil resistance."

"Good journalism questions the land of a thousand [forbidden topics] even at the risk of uncanny and disturbing findings. …Now, journalists are neither detectives nor spiritual preachers. It is enough when they do their job properly. But there is always also an investigative side to the journalistic profession, as well as an ethical one. Journalists are not detectives but through their job they can perform some measure of investigation; journalists are not detectives, but they can provide facts that detectives may somewhat use. Journalists are not even spiritual guides, but, properly doing their job, they can offer occasions and clues that can also help to somewhat nourish the soul of their readers. Let’s all wisely stay away from preaching journalism, but good journalists can at least avoid poisoning their own as well as their readers’ souls."

"Sin and evil will never be eradicated from humanity, but human beings have the moral duty to tame, contain, and battle sin as much as possible. Since politics is the art of governing people for that supreme goal that is good, let us hope that, on Taiwan’s Judicial Day, Taiwan’s politics would find a way to regain its independence from the wrongdoings of some of its branches and corrupt officials, and consider the solution of the Tai Ji Men case as a top priority. Only in this way will Taiwan become a full-blown democracy."

"People who suffered persecution, as well as their relatives and friends, know that while individuals can always change their hearts, and even the cruelest criminal may convert, structures based on evil principles can only either persevere in their wrongdoings or change their foundations and become something totally different."

"Let’s interpret [Argentinian American economist Alejandro A.] Chafuen’s remarks in its deepest and broader sense: social justice has little or nothing to do with interference by abusive powers, be it from a government, a rogue bureaucrat, an ideological faction, or an organized group. As [Father Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio] made clear, Chafuen argued, the “justice” implied in “social justice” is not only what the law establishes. It does include the strict, and even technical, legal aspects of the law, but it is chiefly a matter of social concord. It is philosophical before being legal; it is spiritual in nature."

"As the movie [The Book of Eli] teaches, words may have the power to convince and move if they are rich and meaningful, or the power to disappoint and let people down if they are poor and prosaic. Media use words to challenge power or to promote alternative powers, becoming either servants of the power, or watchdogs of the power, or another power themselves. All depend on the words that media choose to use: either the words of truth or the words of the yes-men and the servants of the powers that be. ...Truth is not limited to its material vessels. Media have the power to mobilize for freedom of religion, belief, and creed of Tai Ji Men and all other persecuted groups because they are guardians of words, and words may contain truth. Media only need to start believing it, in Taiwan and all over the world."

"Is there a risk that reducing the debate on religious liberty to different forms of state recognition, including the Italian “,” may implicitly or inadvertently confer to the state the power to grant to religious groups the right to exist? In practice, states do have such power in different countries. The question is whether giving such an authority to the state is morally and philosophically correct. Perhaps, a state should just watch over the compliance of its citizens with the laws (assuming the laws are just), regardless of their religious persuasion, and leave religious groups alone to live and self-regulate their lives. The state is not the source of religious liberty, although it should acknowledge and protect it."