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There is a kind of uniform monotony in the fate of man. Our lives unfold according to ancient, unchangeable laws, according to an invariable and ancient rhythm. 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.
These are colours that would be cheerful anywhere else, but here they are not cheerful; set in place in such an exact and deliberate way they are like the weak, sad smile of someone who doesn’t know how to smile.
Perhaps they are right to camouflage their cafés and restaurants under foreign disguises, because when these places are unequivocally English such a squalid desperation reigns in them as to make anyone who enters think of suicide.
Indeed, nothing in the world is sadder than an English conversation, in which everyone is careful to keep to superficialities and never touch on anything essential. In order not to offend your neighbour, not to violate his privacy—which is sacred—an English conversation revolves around subjects that are extremely boring for everyone concerned, but in which there is no danger.
English shop assistants are the stupidest shop assistants in the world.
Italy is a country which is willing to submit itself to the worst governments. It is, as we know, a country ruled by disorder, cynicism, incompetence and confusion. Nevertheless we are aware of intelligence circulating in the streets like a vivid bloodstream.
However, the English seem to be somehow aware of their sadness and of the sadness which their country inspires in foreigners. When they are with foreigners they have an apologetic air and appear always anxious to get away. They live as if in eternal exile, dreaming of other skies.
In the country of melancholy the mind always returns to death. It does not fear death because it sees the shadow of death as being like the vast shadow of the trees, and like the silence that is already present in the soul, lost in its green sleep.
Once the experience of evil has been endured it is never forgotten.
We have seen reality’s darkest face, and it no longer horrifies us.
When we are happy our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy our memory works with greater vitality. Suffering makes the imagination weak and lazy; it moves, but unwillingly and heavily, with the weak movements of someone who is ill, with the weariness and caution of sick, feverish limbs; it is difficult for us to turn our eyes away from our own life and our own state, from the thirst and restlessness that pervade us.
As far as the things we write are concerned there is a danger in grief just as there is a danger in happiness. Because poetic beauty is a mixture of ruthlessness, pride, irony, physical tenderness, of imagination and memory, of clarity and obscurity—and if we cannot gather all these things together we are left with something meagre, unreliable and hardly alive.
The meagre barren words of our time are painfully wrung from silence and appear like the signals of castaways, beacons lit on the most distant hills, weak, desperate summonses that are swallowed up in space.
As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; nor shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one’s neighbour and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.
The true defence against wealth is not a fear of wealth—of its fragility and of the vicious consequences that it can bring—the true defence against wealth is an indifference to money.
