View all notes
Ferrante: Nino’s traits are more widespread today. Wanting to please those who exercise any sort of power is a characteristic of the subordinate who wants to emerge from his subordinate position. But it’s also a feature of the permanent spectacle in which we are immersed, which by its nature goes hand in hand with superficiality. Superficiality is a synonym not for stupidity but for the display of one’s own body, pleasure in appearances, imperviousness in the face of the spoilsport par excellence, the suffering of others. Lila’s traits instead seem to me the only possible pathway for those who want to be an active part of this world without submitting to it.
[...] In church I'd thought I couldn't live without him, but time was passing. I continued to live. That impression of indispensability was changing. Indispensable now seemed to me not his physical presence -- I imagined him far away in Milan, happy, engaged in countless fine and useful things, recognized by everyone for his merits -- but reorganizing myself around a goal: becoming a person who could earn his respect. I now felt him as an authority equally indeterminate -- would he approve if I acted in such and such a way, or would he be opposed -- and indisputable.
[...] I was amazed by a gesture, a look, the expression on a face. These were moments when everything seemed to have a secret depth and it was up to me to discover it. [...]
"God isn't easy."
"He should think about becoming easy, if he wants me to understand anything."
"An easy God isn't God. He is other from us. We don't communicate with God, he's so beyond our level that he can't be questioned, only invoked. If he manifests himself, he does it in silence, through small precious mute signs that go by completely common names. Doing his will is bowing your head and obligating yourself to believe in him."
I also reduced to a minimum my relations with my mother. I was curt, saying things like: I won't be here today, I'm going to Pascone, and when she asked why, I answered, because I feel like it. I behaved like that certainly to feel free from all the old bonds, to make it clear that I didn't care anymore about the judgment of relatives and friends, their values, their wanting me to be consistent with what they imagined themselves to be.