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Cards, that virtual money, protect us from the vulgarity of cash. But money itself, that artefact of value, protects us from the vulgarity of the commodity. And the commodity, that artefact of desire, protects us from the vulgarity of human relations. In this way, we are marvellously protected.
Regarding the fidelity of a woman you love and who loves you, no cause for worry. For either she is unreservedly faithful to you--or she is cheating on you. And in the latter case, given all you know of her--or think you know--it would be such an incredible betrayal, such a spiritual disillusionment, that it would be a real negative proof of the existence of God!
wow
[...] The male pole position being virtually unoccupied (since man has virtually disappeared), the feminists are in an enormous hurry to move into it, and they naturally fall into the trap that is the void of power itself. In the same way, political power being emptied of its substance, the Left rushed to seize it and immediately disintegrated in the void.
Hysteresia.
Those who continue to vote although there are no more candidates.
Those who continue to watch television when the broadcasters are on strike.
The phantom limb which goes on hurting even after it is amputated.
The man who is made redundant but goes regularly to his former place of work every morning.
The Japanese stubbornly contemplating the sunset at Ayer's Rock even though there is no sun.
The tightrope-walker who keeps edging forward on his imaginary rope until he realizes it is not there and falls into the void.
The subject who takes himself for a subject even though he disappeared long ago.
Annoyed at having first to turn his pullovers the right side out every time he puts them on, he decides to turn them around as soon as he has taken them off. Surely, this is rational. But since this decision does not override the decision automatically to turn out his pullover when he puts it on, he unfailingly ends up with it the wrong side out. A dilemma: how is one to rationalize an act without disturbing one's automatic behaviour? And things are even worse if, faced with this failure, one resolves to give up the innovation, since the old practice is then immediately disrupted too, being no longer spontaneous and infallible. The situation created is a hopeless tangle. The lesson of all this: all clothing should be reversible. Ideas, too, so that one could slip into them from any side.
this is incredible
In this land of perpetual wind and drought, the silent humidity is an event when all the elements are merged in an indistinct, hepatic luminosity, instead of the clarity of light which usually prevails. All the winds have dropped, and the fire of the sky is shrouded i mist. You can no longer even hear the grass growing, as you are said to do in legend. An autumn day in the middle of summer, a day which never broke and lasts for an eternity: until ten o'clock at night.
unexpectedly poetic
Besides, I confess that I don’t like a narrative that tells me programmatically what Naples is like today, what its young people are like today, what the women have become, how the family is in crisis, what ills Italy suffers from. I have the impression that such works are almost always the staging of media clichés, the poeticizing of a magazine article, of a television segment, of sociological research, of a party position. What I expect, instead, from a good story is that it will tell me about today what I can’t know from any other source but that story, from its unique way of putting something into words, from the feeling that it implies.
I wrote this story because it has to do with me. I was inside it for a long time. I kept shortening the distance between the protagonist and me, I occupied all her cavities, and there is nothing about her, today, that I wouldn’t do. So I’m exhausted, and now that the story is finished I have to catch my breath. How? I don’t know, maybe by starting to write another book. Or reading as many as possible on the subject of this story, and so remaining nearby, on the sidelines, and testing it the way you test a cake to see if it’s baked, poking it with a toothpick, pricking the text to see if it’s done.
I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages. The question in every story is the same: is this the right story to seize what lies silent in my depths, that living thing which, if captured, spreads through all the pages and gives them life? The answer is uncertain, even when you get to the end. What happened in the lines, between the lines? Often, after struggles and joys, on the pages there is nothing—events, dialogues, dramatic turns, only that—and you’re frightened by your very desperation.
To me it happens like this: I always struggle at first, it’s hard to get started, no opening seems really convincing; then the story gets going, the bits already written gain power and suddenly find a way of fitting together; then writing becomes a pleasure, the hours are a time of intense enjoyment, the characters never leave you, they have a space-time of their own in which they are alive and increasingly vivid, they are inside and outside you, they exist solidly in the streets, in the houses, in the places where the story must unfold; the endless possibilities of the plot select themselves and the choices seem inevitable, definitive. You begin every day by rereading to get energized, and rereading is pleasant, it means perfecting, enhancing, touching up the past to make it fit with the story’s future. Then this happy period comes to an end. The story is finished. You have to reread not the work of the day before but the entire narrative. You’re afraid. You test it here and there, nothing is written as you had imagined it. The beginning is insignificant, the development seems crude, the linguistic forms inadequate. It’s the moment when you need help, to find a way to draw the ground the book rests on and understand what substance it is truly made of.
Ferrante: I don’t know. I’ve always had a tendency to separate everyday life from writing. To tolerate existence, we lie, and we lie above all to ourselves. Sometimes we tell ourselves lovely tales, sometimes petty lies. Falsehoods protect us, mitigate suffering, allow us to avoid the terrifying moment of serious reflection, they dilute the horrors of our time, they even save us from ourselves. Instead, when one writes one must never lie. In literary fiction you have to be sincere to the point where it’s unbearable, where you suffer the emptiness of the pages. It seems likely that making a clear separation between what we are in life and what we are when we write helps keep self-censorship at bay.