08-SEP-2009
Not always faster is better.
We don’t realize always instantaneously the changes while they happen and when we might take a little of distance, which could allow us to get a broader perspective over them, they have already become so familiar to us, that we cannot notice them anymore and we take them as if they had always been there, like that.
We have managed to get faster and faster in all what we are doing in our daily life, as if speed was the only way to exorcize time.
We have become more impatient and we have lost the memories of past times, when people seemed to live well at a different pace.
There is an obvious advantage in being able to transmit news and get information instantaneously, I have not any intention to put it in discussion, but there is also a subtle pleasure in slowing down certain things to savour them even better.
To consume every pleasure in a too fast and hectic way forces us necessarily to taste only the superficial flavour of it. We need time to get deeper.
Maybe it would be more enriching seeking to do everything at the right speed; savouring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them.
It’s about quality over quantity in everything related to our life.
It’s probably more important doing everything as well as possible, instead of as fast as possible.
This principle is even more valid when we come to the sphere of human communication.
Without denying the practical role of email, which helps us to keep in touch on real time, I think we can find also space for a rather obsolete form of communication, as real letters, handwritten postcards and all those concrete messages, which are delivered by old fashioned mail and we can keep concretely in our hands and then put in a drawer or between two pages of a book.
This written form of communication, the slow one, has become unusual and for this reason even more precious nowadays.
It’s worthy for the time it has taken to reach us and for the time that the sender has dedicated to compose it.
How many sms can one frantically type on a mobile phone keyboard, how many insipid messages can one post on aseptic virtual social networks during the time someone else needs to buy a postcard, to handwrite a personal text, to put a stamp on it and to walk until the next mail box?
It’s time which makes certain gestures more precious than others, more personal.
I deeply enjoy receiving personal postcards and letters and it doesn’t matter if they take days to reach me, when they arrive, they bring me something unique, the time the sender has offered me as a gift.
We didn’t find the way to waste also the meaning of a postcard depriving it of its individualism yet; for the moment it’s still impossible to copy and paste a postcard...luckily!
16-AUG-2009
"Incipit"
Incipit is the third person of the present tens of the Latin verb incipere and means "it begins".
In modern literary criticism we call “incipit” the first sentence, or even the first paragraph, of a novel or a poem.
If you forgive me the rough simplification, it’s a little like the visit card of a literary composition, the element which lets us have an idea of what we are going to meet.
The incipit of a novel allows us to guess, to perceive characters and their future developments, the landscapes of mind which we are going to explore, by reading the following pages.
Many novels have deeply effective “incipit” which remain in the collective memory.
As example I have chosen here one of the most famous, the incipit of “Anna Karenina” by Lev Tolstoy.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”
Very often the great authors teach us the infinite value of concise simplicity, while the average ones think that adding a lot of elaborated wordy decorations can give importance to a work, which is not strong enough to support itself.
Tolstoy, in a line, already gives us perfectly the atmosphere and the theme of his novel.
If we cannot make ourselves understood with the essential, we cannot get any better results adding too much of superfluous.
It seems to me that this basic rule is valid in all fields.
I have always liked playing with my feelings for literary characters and comparing them with other readers’ impressions.
I do think it’s an enjoyable and rather valid little test to understand something of our own personality and to have a different perspective over others’ one.
The mechanism is simple; one considers the characters of a novel, without looking necessarily for any affinity or similitude in places, time and events.
The choice must be based only on spontaneous and irrational liking or disliking.
Which is your favorite character of “ Anna Karenina” and which one do you really dislike?
There is not any need to motivate the choice, it’s even better to not motivate it at all, to avoid all risks of rational conditioning values.
All authors, composing a novel, have feelings for their characters, feelings of different sign, either negative or positive.
12-FEB-2009
Too many words generate noise. Silence generates thoughts.
Words should be respected in their essence and in their meaning, while too often they are used for speaking sake or to hide the lack of consistence and deeds.
Words can be the tools which allow us to express impressive concepts, deep feelings or evocative descriptions, but they can also be a display of emptiness or a series of common places.
Words are a double-edged weapon to handle with care.
Edgar Allan Poe, a person who knew how to use words, said “Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”
The ineluctable interconnection between words and deeds is their force and their weakness at once.
Words should be used as tools of communication and not as a substitute for action.
Often the word “dialogue” is used wrongly as synonymous of “communication”.
People appeal to dialogue inopportunely, as if it was the solution for all conflicts, both in the public and private sphere.
Dialogue becomes a kind of universal panacea, a symbolic aspirin to cure all problems.
Why does it rarely work, since the presuppositions are so positive?
Maybe it’s because dialogue becomes a cacophony of two voices.
We speak because we want to be listened and we call it dialogue, while the purpose of dialogue is not made of two voices, but of two listening individuals.
Listening to each other is the essence of dialogue.
Probably is more important to learn how to listen, in order to be able to speak.
We might start by listening to ourselves, to give an inner voice to our own thoughts, without borrowing already made schemes from others.
Let’s make a little of silence, then, maybe, we’ll start to understand something.