It is no use: either one values what is painful in the past, or one can make little use of it. Time does not return, and it teaches less what requires less effort to absorb. Where it hurts lies an opportunity, and one can only take advantage of the past when one assimilates the paradox of recognizing in it one’s present identity while accepting the part of what was, but is now gone.
Category: Notes
Despite Everything That Can Be Said…
Despite everything that can be said to the contrary, modern literature has made some progress in getting closer to everyday life. And if the banality of plots and characters is sometimes annoying, it is certain that possibilities have opened up in this commonplace scenario, and something new can be said. If the previous tradition expanded the imagination, the new one has led to greater identification with the reader, who now finds it easier to read about his own life narrated by someone else, perhaps venturing into possibilities he had not imagined. In this sense, literature has become richer, and it is good that it has.
Perhaps No More Valuable Lessons…
Perhaps no more valuable lessons can be learned from life than those that come from intense and prolonged anguish. The moment when this is finally overcome is a milestone, because it usually involves an unusual internal effort. Then comes the effort and the catharsis. The tension eases, a positive feeling emerges, but what happened is not forgotten: it remains a living and authentic learning experience, through which the burden of learning has been felt on the skin
There Is Something Marvelous…
There is something marvelous about these very frequent flashes experienced in the immediate vicinity of death, which spring up as if clarifying the whole life, accompanied by an unprecedented lucidity—unprecedented, just before dying! Rationalizing the phenomenon is pointless, but surely something is happening when the events of a lifetime are finally closed, when they can be connected now that they have taken place, and a final meaning can be inferred. Even the outside observer can see that; but to experience it and feel it, that untranslatable something that transforms and convinces, that pacifies and enlightens, it is a pity that, if it is delayed, in others we can only admire it…