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The Marxist revolutions of the past assumed a similar paternalistic privilege of acting on behalf of peoples who might not particularly agree with the actions or the goals. The vanguard was supposed to lead the revolution and the masses eventually to wake up and follow. It was the end that justified many means. Che wrote to his children, "The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love," but what that love was for is opaque. He became one of the harshest parts of a harsh regime. All this was unimaginable to the young man who gave a blanket to a cold unempoyed miner and his wife and empathized with a pretty girl strnded in a leprosarium.
I think of empathy as a kind of music Guevara had caught the sound of, the "still sad music of humanity," as Wordsworth once called it, and then he became deaf to it, a dancer falling out of step. The Cuban Revolution might have been his great moment, when he united his sense of purpose with the intensity of the experience of war. Afterward Che, as he was then known, became a minister of various things, but a restless minister at odds at times with the revolution's commander, Fidel Castro. He tried to foment revolution in the Congo in 1965, with little immediate effect, and then in a backwater of Bolivia in 1967. It was as though he wanted to go back to that moment of becoming rather than live with what the revolution became.
referring to medical practices in Che's time, where doctors would keep patients in the dark, assuming the doctor always knew best
Sometimes to accept is also a gift. The anthropologist David Graeber points out that the explanation that we invented money because barter was too clumsy is false. It wasn't that I was trying to trade sixty sweaters for the violin you'd made when you didn't really need all that wooliness. Before money, Graeber wrote, people didn't barter but gave and received as needs and goods ebbed and flowed. They thereby incurred the indebtedness that bound them together, and reciprocated slowly, incompletely, in the ongoing transaction that is a community. Money was invented as a way to sever the ties by completing the transactions that never needed to be completed in the older system, but existed like a circulatory system in a body. Money makes us separate bodies, and maybe it teaches us that we should be separate.
Others' woes can be used as reproaches and sometimes are: how dare you think about your own private suffering when wars are raging and children are being bombed? There is always someone whose suffering is greater than yours. The reproaches are often framed as though there is an economy of suffering, and of compassion, and you should measure yourself, price yourself, with the same sense of scarcity and finite resources that govern monetary economies, but there is no measure of either. In high doses suffering is boundless and incomparable and overwhelming. Though sometimes paying attention to others gives you perspective, and in suffering similar to your own you might find encouragement in knowing that you're not alone.
I've met privileged young people who were shocked when they discovered the destructive force of injustice in the lives of others around them. Some left their careers to work for human rights or to teach or to tend the damaged. Many lives have a moment of rupture that is an awakening and a change of direction. [...]
some examples she gives: Che Guevara meeting the miner and his wife, and the story of the Buddha
[...] one of the unmentionable facts of everyday life is that we're all made of meat, as I remember when I walk alone, regularly, in the territory of mountain lions. The carnivorous Inuit sometimes say, "The great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls," which doesn't lessen the trauma of anthropophagy, of eating human flesh, but deepens that of everyday consuption of other sentient beings.
In Italy, this observation has been crucial to the literary culture of postwar feminism as articulated by Luisa Muraro, one of Ferrante's influences, and the Milan Woman's Bookstore Collective. As Rebecca Falkoff has suggested, Muraro's theory of affidamento, "a practice of 'putting faith in' or 'entrusting' between women ... would be the basis for a new symbolic order to counter patriarchy."' Second-wave calls for sisterhood relied on two premises: an equal rights platform that denied the specificity of sexual difference between women and men, and the fantasy of unity and consensus among women. In contrast, affidamento imagined that women could build relations independent of men, modeled on the ties between mothers and daughters. These relations did not always entail alignment. Nonalignment was key to figuring the idea of the political as an assortment of individuals rather than a falsely single voice.
Friendship and reading take time, but I tend to be pushy with both. I'm a voracious, perhaps violent reader of novels, and a voracious (hopefully not violent) cultivator of new friendships; I blaze through books in single sittings and similarly crave those day-into-night, coffee-into-beer conversations where you learn everything about a person in one heady rush. This isn't necessarily a good thing. Both of these impulses are surely born out of a brutish impatience to reach some certain knowledge of what will happen, to get to the end. It's hard to force myself to slow down and relish the meandering pleasures of getting to know a person or a novel.
cute
I devoured these books the first time, the way I remember devouring books as a kid, the way Lila does, according to Lend. It was that old feeling, the excitement of having a mind to which another mind is speaking from the page. Rereading them has been remarkably slow—and not just because Sarah encouraged it. Part of me is trying and failing to memorize the sentences, which build rapidly and by association—comma, clause, comma, clause—like the inveterately booming, inveterately corrupt city of Naples. The next part is trying to decipher what has happened here, how this book was made, why I have forced it on every woman I care about with little more than a lame jacket copy summary. Italy. Friendship. Their whole lives. No wonder so many of those women looked at me with blank hopefulness, wishing I would say something intelligent, give them a good reason, or even just a few more words.
"Just trust me," I have to tell them, inadequately. "You'll love it." And the fact is, everyone does.
Why?
Mostly, I think, because it is a book about deciphering that which is present and has always been around us: life, these people, our parents and neighbors, the world into which we are born, our maddening friends. It's all there already, our material, we just have to put it in order. So, in going back to the beginning, for the slow, searching reread, I can't help but think about the arrangement of this material—the order in which Lend, who is writing it, presents it to us—which seems to be the order in which it presents itself to her.
Yet while The Great Gatsby or A Separate Peace or On the Road—these bro-love tales of masculine exceptionalism—suggest to us that bright-burning human fireworks like this might actually exist somewhere, Ferrante's brilliant friend[s] show[s] us the opposite. Rather, I wonder if Ferrante's point is to highlight the fact that all friendships—especially real, deep, true ones—are, on some level, built on fantastic projections. We don't get to know the real Lila (Lina to everyone else in the neighborhood) and can't ever, really. For as long as Lend is our narrator, we'll be blinded by the too-bright blaze of her particular and singular understanding of Lila as her enigmatic and brilliant friend, her opposite, her better half. It's a weird depiction of friendship that offers a frightening revelation: that to some extent, perhaps all our friends are imaginary ones. But even if our friends are somehow unreal to us, it doesn't mean that friendship, and friend-love, aren't real or true. And even if this sounds shifty and makes me seem like something of a sociopath, I don't honestly think it's a bad thing. It's also kind of a beautiful thing—it's what lets us see our close companions through the bifocals of friendship (critical on top, rose-colored on bottom), to describe them in that particular nonerotic language of love that Jill evoked. It's the imaginary, malleable quality of our friends that allows us to shape them into desirable and aspirational definites, visions of personhood clearer than our own uncomfortable partial views of our misshapen, amorphous selves. Thus, a large part of Lila's magnetic draw is in the specificity of her depiction. [...]
Solidarity to Lenu is both a dream and a nightmare; she wants to join in, but she is too afraid to relinquish her unique self to give in to the triumphal we that Jill highlighted in Balestrini. To her, that “we” is irreconcilable with the solitude of independent being or, more specifically, the desired solitude of the autonomous female being. For increasingly, as she walks through the mass of protesters looking for a familiar face or name (her own), Lent finds it particularly hard to articulate the women from the mass or from each other. She sees men in passing and notes them individually as “handsome, ugly, well-dressed, scruffy, violent, frightened, amused,” yet the women she sees “stayed close together ... they shouted together, laughed together, and if they were separated by even a few meters they kept an eye on each other so as not to get lost” (TWL, 69). Only a few individuals “by themselves or at most in pairs,” move amongst the groups of men, and they are marked by their hard-won distinction from the other women: “they seemed to me the happiest, the most aggressive, the proudest.” It is 1968 and while Lent struggles to absorb “the lesson from France,” she is deeply terrified by the idea of losing the distinctly singular, female self she has worked so hard (albeit confusedly) to keep cleanly defined and bounded, in order to join the massed bodies of implicitly male solidarity.