One, None and a Hundred Thousand

by Luigi Pirandello

I made the best of it, accepting as a generous concession what had been denied me as a right.

Doesn’t everybody know what wives are for? Made, precisely, for discovering a husband’s faults.”

From that day on, I longed most ardently to be alone, if only for an hour. It was really more than a longing; it was a need, a sharp and pressing, a restless need, which was aggravated to the point of fury by the presence or proximity of my wife.

Today, you fix yourself in one fashion, tomorrow in another.

Do you think you can know yourself, if you do not in some fashion build yourself up? 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. Yet what can there be in the way of knowledge? Can it be that this form is the thing itself? Yes, as much for me as for you, but not for me as it is for you; so true is this that I do not recognize myself in that form which you confer upon me, nor you yourself in that which I confer upon you; 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.

Ah, to lose one’s self there, to stretch out and abandon one’s self, there in the grass, under the silent heavens, to fill one’s soul with all that reach of blue, letting every thought, every memory go shipwreck!