One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

by Luigi Pirandello

a little smoke that is speedily dispersed in the emptiness of space. Every thought, every memory of man is like that smoke.

rise up and go back to town, and no sooner will you be there than you shall at once understand why it is man wants to fly.

if trees did think, and if they could talk, who knows what they would say, the poor things, planted as we have planted them in the midst of the town, to provide us with a little shade! It would seem, as they view their reflections in these shop windows, that they were asking what it is they are doing here, amid all these bustling people, in the clamorous confusion of city life.

What a dreamlike atmosphere of abandonment in that little square, and what a weird silence when, from the dark musk-scented tiles of that old cloister, the morning's blue, blue infant smile appears! And yet, each year, the earth there, in its stupid maternal ingenuity, seeks to take advantage of that silence.

it fancies that the town is no longer present, that men have deserted this little square, and accordingly endeavors to take possession of it again by reaching out, very softly, very gently, innumerable tendrils of grass above the pavement. Nothing could be more fresh and delicate than those timid slender shoots, with which the whole of the little square will soon be verdant. But unfortunately, it will not last more than a month.

They are trimming this old pavement’s beard.” They flew away in horror, those two little birds.

But perhaps they, too, animals, plants and all things, know a meaning and a value of their own, one which man is unable to grasp, shut up as he is in those which he himself gives to one and all, and which Nature very often, for her part, declines to recognize and ignores.

Too often, Nature takes a pleasure in knocking down all our ingenious constructions. Cyclones, earthquakes—But man does not give up. He rebuilds, rebuilds, stubborn little animal that he is. Everything to him is material for building.

Man takes even himself as material, and builds himself, my dear sirs, like a house.

Or that I can know you, if I do not build you. up after my own fashion? Or you me, if you do not build me up after your fashion? We can only know that to which we succeed in giving form.

the same thing is not the same to all; and even for any one of us, it may constantly change, and in fact does constantly so change. And yet, there is no reality beyond the one which lies in that momentary form which we succeed in conferring upon ourselves, upon others, upon things.

I am continually building myself and building you, and you are doing the same, inversely.

Hold fast, hold fast, if you do not care to take these dives in the void, and go forth to meet unwelcome surprises. But what fine buildings come out of it all.

Yet no doubt she knew that Gengé of hers better than I knew him! Seeing it was she who had built him up! And he was not by any means a puppet. If any one, the puppet was I.

—how I should have liked to box his ears, to give him a caning, tear him to pieces! But I could not come at him.

of the mad things I began to do, by way of discovering all those other Moscardas that went on living in my nearest acquaintances, and with the object of destroying them one by one.

it must be that I possessed a certain aspect, a certain meaning, a certain value for others, not only by reason of my physical features beyond the range of sight and fancy, but also on account of so many other things, to which, up to then, I had not given so much as a thought. To think of this was to feel a fierce impulse to rebellion.

The spirit that was I possessed no name whatsoever of its own; it possessed a whole world of its own that lay within; and I did not at every turn stamp with this, my name, to which in truth I gave no thought, all the things that I beheld within me and about me.

There was nothing out of the ordinary, no, so long as I did not pause to reflect that the tone of my friend’s voice for me was not at all the tone of voice that he knew, for the reason that he did not know at all the tone of that voice which was his; and his appearance, too, was as I saw it, that is, the one that I conferred upon him, looking at him from without, while he, as he spoke, assuredly did not have in his mind’s eye any picture of himself, not even the one that he attributed to himself, and which he recognized upon glancing into a mirror.

Neat and courteous, he would respond with a smile; until one was almost ashamed of having to call him by a name like that.

Conditions of birth and family? I myself had never confronted them squarely, by way of evaluating them as others were in a position to do, each in his own way, understand, with his own individual pair of scales, and with the balancing weights of envy, hatred, contempt,

it was not I who had fashioned that body, who had given myself that name; I had been brought into life by others without my will; and similarly, through no will of my own, so many things—above, within and round about—had come to me from others;

My family’s history in the province. I had never given it a thought; yet that history, for others, was in me; I was an individual, the last of that family; I bore the mark of it in me, in my body, and who could say in how many habitual thoughts and actions, on which I never had reflected, but which it was obvious that others clearly recognized in me,

that smile was a lurking betrayal, a sort of mute and frigid grin, a thing which I had never noticed before.

that shiny pate, circled by reddish hair, red like my own—that is, mine was like his—and how could it be mine, then, when it so obviously came to me from him?

I was conscious within of all the terror that comes from blind necessities, from things that cannot change: the prison of time; being born now, and not before or after; the name and body that is given one; the chain of causality; the seed which that man cast, my father without having willed it; my coming into the world, from that seed, that man’s involuntary fruit, attached to that branch, sent up by those roots.

I went to the university and there spent six years changing from one course to another without drawing any profit from any of them; this led to my being called back to Richieri, where I was promptly married off, whether as a reward or a punishment, I cannot say.

the tremulous delicacy of those big hands as they button up the little white nightshirt about his son’s neck. And to think how ferocious those hands will be, at dawn tomorrow, upon the scaffold.

a reputation that tomorrow will weigh like a burden of shame upon his young son, who for the moment is unconscious of it all, and who is amusing himself by playing hide-and-seek with out of the way thoughts, poor little freakish indulgence,

That burst of laughter instantly shattered my horror, routed the incubus of blind necessity, against which my spirit, in its deep-going search, had shiveringly bumped a short while before.

I was all of a sudden conscious of two pairs of eyes, driven into my soul like four poisoned daggers,

my first victims. I mean, the first marked out for the experimental destruction of a Moscarda.

they are not only a prison, but the most unjust sort of one that could be imagined.

Even for himself, then, Tizio has as many realities as there are individuals among us who know him; he knows himself in one fashion with me and in another fashion with you, and so on, with a third, a fourth, indefinitely. Which is equivalent to saying that Tizio is really one individual with me, another with you, another still with a third person, yet another with a fourth, etc., while he himself—he himself especially-all the while preserves the illusion that he is one to all.

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.

That is my description. Factual data, you say. And would you go on to deduce from it the reality that is mine? Do you fancy that those data, which in themselves mean nothing, hold an equal meaning and value for all? And even if they succeeded in conveying a complete and accurate picture of me, where would they picture me as being? In what reality?

from all this do you think it follows that all five of you confer the same reality upon this house and upon me?

For one, I may be an imbecile because I keep Quantorzo as director of the bank and Firbo for my legal adviser, which is the very reason why another holds me to be a most sagacious chap; this other rather sees a glaring evidence of my imbecility in the fact that I take my wife's bitch out walking every day, and so on.

One of you will say, “Moscarda did this,” and another will reply, “What do you mean, he did that? It was something else entirely that he did!” And a third will say, “He did very well indeed, as I see it. He did just what he ought to have done!” “What he ought to have done! I like that! What he did was very bad. Now, what he ought to have done—” And the fifth: “What he ought to have done? What should you say if I told you, he did nothing at all!”

what harm am I doing you? 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,

there were the two you’s which you had, of a sudden, discovered in yourself, and you could not permit the affairs of one to be mingled with those of the other, inasmuch as the two of them had, in reality, nothing in common.

Come, come, go back to reading my little book now, and do not smile over it any more, as you have been doing.

I no longer possess a world of my own;

What an admirable precision is that of time and space!

Eternity has yawned for me,

mil-lion-aires, as he, spacing the word into syllables, put it, with a scowl from his ferocious, wide-staring eyes.

If Julius Caesar was himself only where you admire him, when he was no longer there, where was he? Who was he? No one? Anyone? And who?” We should have to ask Calpurnia, his wife, or Nicomedes, King of Bithynia. Talk on and on; and by the time you are through, the further thought will have occurred to you: that Julius Caesar, the individual, did not exist.

He had been saying, for ten years gone by now, that he was going to England the coming week. But had those years really gone by for him, after all? They had gone by for those who had heard him say it.

he had carried an English grammar under his arm, open and turned down always at the same page, so that those two open pages, from the brushing of his arm and the grime of his coat sleeve, had become by now thoroughly illegible, while the following pages remained incredibly clean.

the consciousness of madness, as clear and fresh, good people, as fresh and clear as an April morning, as shining and precise as a mirror.