One, None and a Hundred Thousand

by Luigi Pirandello

You do nothing, or very little. You make up your minds, in the long run, with an admirable and utter sureness of yourselves, that others have misunderstood you, misjudged you, and that is that. If it is a matter of concern to you, you seek to correct that judgment by giving clarifying explanations; if it is not a matter of concern, you let it go and shrug your shoulders, exclaiming, “Oh, well, my conscience is clear, and that suffices me.”

You go on living inside it; you walk out of it in security. You see it, you touch it; and within it, you even smoke a cigar, if you like (a pipe? very well, a pipe), and blissfully stay there watching the smoke-spirals vanishing, one by one, in the air. Without the faintest suspicion that all the reality about you has for others no more consistency than has that smoke.

We both employed, you and I, the same language, the same words. But is it our fault, yours and mine, if 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.

And now, just see what had come to me! The fact was, I did not know myself, did not possess for myself any reality of my own, but was in a state of constant semi-fluid, semi-malleable fusion; others knew me, each after his own fashion, in accordance with that reality which they had conferred upon me; which is to say, they saw in me a Moscarda that was not I, inasmuch as I, properly speaking, was no one to myself; there were as many Moscardas as there were other individuals, and all of them were more real than I, who had, I repeat, no reality whatsoever so far as I myself was concerned.

I ran the risk—or rather, as you shall see, we ran the risk, every man of us—of the insane asylum that first time. And that was not enough; we had to risk our lives as well, in order that I in the end (one, none and a hundred-thousand) might find and resume the path of well-being.

which causes you to exclaim to the friend at your side, “I beg your pardon I But how does it come that you don’t see this? Are you blind?” And your friend does not see it, but sees another thing, when you all the while feel that he ought to be seeing what you see, as you see it. He, on the contrary, sees it as it appears to him; and for him, therefore, the blind man is yourself.

“Madman! Madman! Madman!” And all because I had wanted to prove that I could be to others, as well as myself, something other than what they believed me to be.

I loved her, notwithstanding the torture that came to me from the absolute awareness of not, in my own body, belonging to myself as the object of her love.