Lucky’s Reviews > Mario and the Magician > Status Update

Freedom exists, and also the will exists; but freedom of the will does not exist, for a will that aims at its own freedom aims at the unknown. You are free to draw or not to draw. But if you draw, you will draw the right cards—the more certainly, the more wilfully obstinate your behaviour.

They enjoy speaking, they enjoy listening; and they listen with discrimination. For the way a man speaks serves as a measure of his personal rank; carelessness and clumsiness are greeted with scorn, elegance and mastery are rewarded with social eclat.

Perhaps more than anywhere else, the eighteenth century is still alive in Italy, and with it the charlatan and mountebank type so characteristic of the period.

Shall we strike sail, avoid a certain experience so
soon as it seems not expressly calculated to increase our enjoyment or our self-esteem? Shall we go away whenever life looks like turning in the slightest uncanny, or not quite normal, or even rather painful and mortifying? No, surely not. Rather stay and look matters in the face, brave them out, perhaps precisely in so doing lies a lesson for us to learn.

A certain poet says that it is indolence which makes us endure uncomfortable situations.