Discomfort chases away futility with such absolute effectiveness that its arrival often proves to be providential. Without it, how many enterprises would have been neglected, how many decisions would never have been made, how many biographies would no longer exist? So we have to value it as a motivating element, rather than giving in to the more common impulse to complain. When we look at their works, both in abundance and quality, discomfort completely overwhelms comfort.
If What Distinguishes Being Is the Act…
If what distinguishes being is the act, and what characterizes the act is the choice, it is necessary to repeat a thousand times that the individual always becomes the choices he makes, and that wisdom comes down to knowing how to choose. The problem is that choice, as a unifying element, is less a decision than a perennial practice, so that without this continuity, it would fall apart and even become null and void. Choosing, therefore, involves deciding and sticking to the decision.
The Experience of the Wars of the Last Century…
The experience of the wars of the last century has left such a mark on literature that it sometimes bores us to see it recounted again, since we are so far removed from it and it has long since been assimilated. The truth is, however, that it has not been assimilated at all, or at least the generations living today are not drawing on its lessons. It was to be hoped that, with so many accounts, so many examples of intellectuals thrown into prison and who took this circumstance as fuel for their own vocation, something would change in the human understanding of existence, and that at the very least a generation would emerge vaccinated against the mistakes of the recent past. But no, no… it is a myth that one generation starts from the point reached by the previous one. Today, we have to read and reread past stories as experiences that will probably return.
Some Biographies Generate…
Some biographies generate in us moderns an effect similar to the one we experience when, after getting bored with some trifle or complaining about life, we meet a homeless person. Because, in fact, some of the most famous names in universal literature have been beggars themselves—famous, by the way, not because of their material condition, but because of the greatness of their works. And then we discover how incapable we have become of enduring misery, since little things bother us a lot, and a fraction of the adversity endured by so many of our ancestors would be enough to wipe us out. At least the embarrassing is useful.