Passing by

At many things we feel awe but at nothing more than at man 

(Antigone – Sophocles) 

It is usually said you must never start a book like this: One morning I woke up, I was tired, I was discontented of my life, I was sad and depressed...
But one morning I woke up, I was tired, I was discontented of my life, I was sad and depressed...
And I knew why. I was stuck in a nowhere zone, buried by the impossibility to find the right story to write.
I was writing two books at that time. One was about a young idealist who took part in the Italian Risorgimento. I got my inspiration from Ippolito Nievo and his last day of life. I wanted this story hinged on his last trip from Palermo to Napoli. Everything had to happen on board of the steamer Ercole, before the shipwreck. I wanted to use the techniques of flashback and foreshadowing to recollect all the story of Nievo, from the day he was disembarked from one vessel in the port of Marsala with a thousand of other red shirts to that last day of his life. I wanted to show the failure of his ideals which brought him to Sicily with Garibaldi. I wanted to show the disillusion for having believed in a country that there wasn’t and there would never be.
The other book was about a martial artist who lived in Vilnius and meets love in this city and a descendant of the Reptilian bloodline, as well. Because of this second book, I fell in a new field that forced me in exhausting readings.
I came across David Icke a theorist of the Reptilian race. I started reading his book The Biggest Secret. A kind of Bible about the Reptilians race. Too much information, too much of everything. It was misleading. And reading it exhausted me... I suffered. I didn’t want to suffer. My life was sufferance.

I thought that Nievo too had that kind of sufferance, the same I had. Which was impossible to define.
I felt without parachute. I was falling without protection. All my life has changed and I have changed following my life.
The cells of my body had died billions and billions of times and billions and billions of times had reborn.
Everything had passed by.
Except Me.
How many billions of Me, I had been before this Me.
Who was I?
I didn’t find an answer. I couldn’t find it. There was no answer.
I had lost my identity.
I knew for sure that I was a new Me. A new reborn Me structured by a new life in Vilnius. New signals, new odours, new tastes and flavours…new information coming from this new environment was modifying my behaviour. My Me.

And I thought of Nievo. I thought he had my same discontent. A discontent caused by his job of intendente di finanza, discontent for Sicily and Sicilians. Discontent for ideals he felt betrayed by a new State, which seemed less free than the many before the Unification.

I had lost two daughters. Like dead. But they were alive. Just like.
Sara stopped talking to me two years ago. Cassia is gradually ceasing to talk to me. She doesn't write to me anymore, she doesn't call me anymore. Perhaps Sara is influencing her decisions.
I am sad. I thought I have been a good father. I loved them with all my heart. And yet ... it wasn't enough.
But what is my fault?
I have sought a new life, in another country, with a woman I love.
Is this my fault?
It must be.

For the first time in my life, I was compelled by an urgent need to write a complete autobiographical story. I need to discharge all my sufferance.
I had pushed away too far the essence of my life and ended up in heartless stories, without passion. Without the warmth taken from real life.
I had to touch a life dissimilar to the life painted by Icke in his books, I needed the unreal life of the everyday routine. I needed the warm and flux, I needed the ignorance and the thoughtlessness, the animality and the domestication that can satiate your pain, that gives you the message that you live like every other in this life.
I was tired of being on the verge of another world.
Foscolo's words came to mind "O my Lorenzo! I don't have the peace I hoped for from solitude”.

(Photo via https://welovelithuania.com)