I sometimes find my words lacking the power, the forcefulness that my emotions carry, so out of laziness, I borrow others' words. These are some recent ones.
On dressing up for the male gaze (from Neapolitan Novels)
In recent years I had begun to be interested in fashion, to educate my taste under Adele’s guidance, and now I enjoyed dressing up. But sometimes – especially when I had dressed not only to make a good impression in general but for a man – preparing myself (this was the word) seemed to me to have something ridiculous about it. All that struggle, all that time spent camouflaging myself when I could be doing something else. The colors that suited me, the ones that didn’t, the styles that made me look thinner, those that made me fatter, the cut that flattered me, the one that didn’t. A lengthy, costly preparation. Reducing myself to a table set for the sexual appetite of the male, to a well-cooked dish to make his mouth water. And then the anguish of not succeeding, of not seeming pretty, of not managing to concel with skill the vulgarity of the flesh with its moods and odors and imperfections. But I had done it. I had done it also for Nino, recently. I had wanted to show him that I was different, that I had achieved a refinement of my own, that I was no longer the girl at Lila’s wedding, the student at the party of Professor Galiani’s children, and not even the inexperienced author of a single book, as I must have appeared in Milan. But now, enough.
On work
Everything is interesting if you know how to work on it Feymnman said something similar — “almos everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough”
On the value of listening and keeping a secret
Once I told her a secret*. I was afraid and I needed to tell someone the reason for my fear. I told her and she listened attentively, and I calmed down. It was important for me to talk to her, it seemed to me that she listened not with her ears but with an organ that she alone had and that made the words acceptable. At the end I didn’t ask her, as one usually does: swear, please, not to betray me. But it’s clear that if she hasn’t told you** she hasn’t told anyone, not even out of spite, not even in the period that was hardest for her, when my brother hated her and beated her.
“*” refers to the fact that the speaker is gay. “**” refers to the best friend of the secret guarder.
on how youth is wasted on the young
But at first chance it all started again. I fantasized, I listened at high volume to the music I had been ignorant of as a girl, I didn’t read, I didn’t write. And I felt increasingly regretful that, because of my self-discipline in everything, I had missed the joy of letting go that the women of my age, of the milieu I now lived in, made a show of having enjoyed and enjoying.
On men’s desire to educate women
I thought about it for a moment, and continued: Maybe there’s something mistaken in this desire men have to instruct us; I was young at the time, and I didn’t realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn’t like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew how to be not only a man in the right way but also a woman. And today when he no longer senses me as a part of himself, he feels betrayed.
On the role of language and who we are
It occured to me that it was now a linguistic question. She resorted to Italian as if to a barrier; I tried to push her toward dialect, our language of candor. But while her Italian was translated from dialect, my dialect was increasingly translated from Italian, and we both spoke a false langauge.
On life’s elusiveness
Seeing how cheap and ugly they were (their childhood dolls) I felt confused. Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.
On working hard
I used to write from midnight to four o’clock. I had young children then, various jobs (from working with mice to working with cadaver tissue to teaching writing), and an ambition to keep writing separate from my real life. When most people were being ferried across the night by sleep, unaware of time, unaware of weather, I felt the luxury of living on the cusp of reality. Night for those sound sleepers was a cocoon against time. For me, I wanted to believe, it was even better. Time, at night, was my possession, not the other way around.
an ambition person vs a dreamer
Apart from feeling unqualified to be called a dreamer, I may also be worrying about being mistaken for one of those who call themselves dreamers but are merely ambitious. One meets them often in life, their ambitions smaller than dreams, more commonplace, in need of broadcasting and dependent on recognition from this particular time. If they cause pain to others, they have no trouble writing of those damages as the cost of their dreams.
On killing time
To kill time – an English phrase that still chills me: time can be killed only by frivolous matters and purposeless activities.
We are fundamentally lonely
Often I think that writing is a futile effort; so is reading; so is living. Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one’s private language. That emptiness is filled with public language or romanticized connections. But one must be cautious when assuming meaning. A moment of recognition between two people only highlights the inadequacy of language. What can be spoken does not sustain; what cannot be spoken undermines.
On looking for solutions in books
For years I have had the belief that all my questions will be answered by the books I am reading. Books, however, only lead to other books.
on decisive, yet mundane moments
I checked out The Hill Bachelors, Trevor’s newest collection, after reading the story, and trudged through the snow from the university library to the student union, where I sat on a green sofa next to a movie theater where films in foreign languages drew a limited crowd every night. Details preserved by memory can be dull, significant only to the one remembering, but it is the mundane that remains mysterious.
not talking about books that we like
Trevor’s books – Other People’s Worlds, Fools of Fortune, Elizabeth Alone, The Story of Lucy Gault, and many more – offer me a haven. But even to explain that is to intrude: there is the privacy of Trevor, who has built that space; there is my privacy, too – in writing and in life one is often sustained by memories unshared.
why fictional characters are better
One cannot be an adept writer of one’s life; nor can one be a discerning reader of that tale. Not equipped with a novelist’s tools to create plots and maneuver pacing, to speak omnisciently or abandan an inconvenient point of view, to adjust time’s linearity and splice the less connected moments, the most interesting people among us, I often suspect, are flatter than the flattest character in the novel.
The real reason of death
on death Enfin, ça, c’est ce qu’ont dit les médecins. Ils ne disent jamais qu’un homme de cinquante-cinq ans peut mourir de ne pas avoir été aimé, de ne pas avoir été entendu, d’avoir reçu trop de factures, d’avoir contracté trop de crédits à la consommation, d’avoir vu ses enfants grandir et puis partir, sans vraiment dire au revoir.