One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

by Luigi Pirandello

we are ready enough to note the faults of others, while all the time unconscious of our own.

If I was not for others what up to then I had believed myself to be to myself, what was I?

How could I endure this stranger within me? This stranger who was I myself to me? How to go on not seeing him? Not knowing him? How remain condemned forever to bear him about with me, in me, in the sight of all others, and all the while outside my own?

The presumption that reality, as it is for you, ought to be and is the same for all others.

all the reality about you has for others no more consistency than has that smoke.

You tell me that this is something everybody knows, that the mind changes and anyone may be mistaken. It is, in fact, an old story. I, however, do not pretend to be telling you anything new. I merely have a question to put to you: “Good Lord, why is it, then, that you act as if you did not know it? Why is it that you insist upon believing that the only reality is your own, the reality of today, and why do you cry out in angry astonishment that your friend is wrong, although he, poor chap, whatever he might do, could never have within himself the mind that is your own?”

I shall never be able to tell you, how what you say to me is translated inside me.

words in themselves are empty? Empty, my dear friend. You fill them with your meaning, as you speak them to me; while I, in taking them in, inevitably fill them with my own. We thought we understood each other; we did not understand each other at all.

a minute ago, when this thing happened to you, you were a different person; not only that, you were at the same time a hundred others, a hundred thousand. And believe me, there is no occasion for wonderment in this fact. Look rather and see if it now seems to you so certain that tomorrow you will be what you assume you are today.

Let us say, then, that what we call peace is to be found within ourselves. Doesn’t it seem so to you? And do you know where it comes from? From the very simple fact that we have just now left the town, that is, a world that is built—houses, streets, churches, squares—not for this reason alone, however, because it is built, but also because we no longer live for the sake of living, like these plants, without knowing how to live, but rather for something that is not and which we put there, for something that gives meaning and value to life, a meaning, a value which here, at least in part, we succeed in losing, or of which we recognize the grievous vanity. Hence comes your languor and your melancholy. I understand, I understand. Let-down of nerves. Afflicting need of self-abandonment. You feel yourself relaxing, you abandon yourself.

We are in the country here; languor has relaxed our limbs; it is natural that illusions and disillusionments, joys and griefs, hopes and desires should appear to us vain and transitory in the presence of that sentiment which breathes from objects that are enduring, self-overcoming, impassive. All you have to do is to look

“Oh, the ambitions of mankind!” Quite right. For example, that cry of victory because man, like that old hat of yours, has started to fly, to play the bird! Meanwhile, have a look at a real bird here, and see how it flies. Did you see it? A more honest, more graceful facility, accompanied by a spontaneous trill of joy. Think, on the other hand, of the awkward, rumbling apparatus, and of all the fear, anxiety and mortal anguish of man when he tries to play the bird! Here a swish of wings and a trill; there a noisy, foul-smelling motor, and death in the offing. The motor goes wrong, the motor stops; good-bye, birdie!

The faculty of deluding one’s self that today’s reality is the only true one, if on the one hand it affords us a support, on the other hand hurls us into a bottomless void, for the reason that today’s reality is destined to discover itself an illusion tomorrow. And life knows no conclusion. It cannot know any. If tomorrow there were to be a conclusion, all would be over.

It is you who are harming me, by assuming that I do not have, could not have, any other reality beyond the one that you give me—a reality, believe me, that is yours alone, an idea of your own, which you have made for yourselves of me, a possibility of being that you are conscious of, as it looks to you, the possibility of which you recognize in yourself; but as to what I am capable of being to myself, you not only can know nothing about that, but neither can I.

Men—do you understand?—have need of building a house even for their sentiments. It is not enough for them to have those sentiments within them, in their hearts; they want to see them outside, as well, so that they can touch them; and so, they proceed to build them a house.”