The Little Virtues: Essays

by Natalia Ginzburg

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.

But what kind of men will they be? I mean, what kind of shoes will they have when they are men? What road will they choose to walk down? Will they decide to give up everything that is pleasant but not necessary, or will they affirm that everything is necessary and that men have the right to wear sound, solid shoes on their feet?

This indistinct shadow compounded of anxieties And ancient shudderings is like a nocturnal sea On which the sky rests lightly, and which Returns each evening. The voices of the dead Are like the breaking of that sea.]

From time to time on the street you find yourself in front of a beautiful tree covered in tender pink or brilliant white blossom, a gracious adornment to the street. But as you look at it you realize that it is there according to some precise plan and not by chance. And the fact that it is not there by chance but according to a precise plan makes its beauty seem sad. In Italy a tree in blossom at the roadside would be a delightful surprise. It would be there by chance, having sprung out of the earth in sheer joy, and not because a calculated decision had been made that it should be there.

Every place where the English gather to chat to one another exudes melancholy. 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.

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. This is an intelligence which is clearly useless. It is not used to benefit any institution that might to some extent improve the human condition. All the same, it warms and consoles the heart, even if this is an illusory comfort and perhaps a foolish one.

England is a country where people stay exactly as they are. The soul does not receive the slightest jolt. It stays always still, unchanging, protected by a gentle, temperate, humid climate without seasonal extremes, in the same way that the green of the fields (which it is impossible to imagine being greener) stays the same throughout the seasons, never eaten away by intense cold or devoured by the sun. The soul does not free itself from its vices but neither does it attach itself to new vices. Like the grass, the soul silently lulls itself in its green solitude, watered by the tepid rain.

Everything I do is done laboriously, with great difficulty and uncertainty. I am very lazy, and if I want to finish anything it is absolutely essential that I spend hours stretched out on the sofa.

so young, so educated, so uninvolved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever, as the sun set, at the corner of the street.

There is an unbridgeable abyss between us and the previous generation. The dangers they lived through were trivial and their houses were rarely reduced to rubble.

These things existed in me. And the man and the woman were neither good nor evil, but funny and a little sad and it seemed to me that I had discovered how people in books should be—funny and at the same time sad.

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.

Every day silence harvests its victims. Silence is a mortal illness.

We become adolescents when the words that adults exchange with one another become intelligible to us; intelligible, but of no interest because we no longer care whether peace reigns in the house or not.

We wait for the right person; every morning when we get up we think that this could be the day when we meet him; we dress and comb our hair with infinite care, and overcome the desire to go out in an old raincoat and shapeless shoes; the right person might just happen to be on the corner of the street.

We no longer fear death; every hour, every minute, we look at death and remember its great silence on the face that was dearest to us.

We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbour is a human action and so it is always evil or good, true or deceitful, a kindness or a sin.

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.

Being moderate with oneself and generous with others; this is what is meant by having a just relationship with money, by being free as far as money is concerned.

A child from a rich family will not learn moderation because they have made him wear old clothes, or because they have made him eat a green apple for tea, or because they deny him a bicycle he has wanted for a long time; such moderation in the midst of wealth is pure fiction, and fictions always lead to bad habits. In this way he will only learn to be greedy and afraid of money.

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.

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

And what is a human being’s vocation but the highest expression of his love of life? And so we must wait, next to him, while his vocation awakens and takes shape.

But if we have a vocation, if we have not denied or betrayed it, then we can let them develop quietly and away from us, surrounded by the shadows and space that the development of a vocation, the development of an existence, needs. This is perhaps the one real chance we have of giving them some kind of help in their search for a vocation—to have a vocation ourselves, to know it, to love it and serve it passionately; because love of life begets a love of life.