Not Being God: A Collaborative Autobiography

My dear Stefano,

Does growing older ease the pain of living? Does it make us less capable of suffering, and so of loving and experiencing passion? Does it make us more cynical, harder, less sensitive? I ask myself this today, at the onset of my old age.

I fear that the answer is yes, and I reproach myself for it.

On my seventieth birthday I spent the day—you weren’t there, as usual, I note with a touch of bitterness, but with much greater tenderness for you, as you know, and acceptance of your being so young and beautiful—I was saying, on my seventieth birthday I spent the day with a few friends in the little house I have at Roquebrune, drinking terrible wine and sending e-mails saying, “Today I bid a sad farewell to sixty-nine.”

Then I took a fall. Like a moron. Like a baby. Stumbled, slipped, I don’t know. What I do know is that I banged my head hard and got a huge bump. I keep asking myself: Is this the first sign of dementia? Have I got a brain tumor? Is this kind of thing normal at my age?

I know well enough that people will adapt to anything sooner or later to keep on living. But though this is immensely reassuring, it does make it seem as though things, even the most important things, thereby lose value. It’s, how shall I put it, a little . . . disappointing.

When Sergio, who had lived with Gianpiero and me for close to fifteen years, and then alone with me for another eleven, died, the pain I felt was less acute than when Gianpiero died. And for that I do blame myself. I really have the impression that I felt less pain, that I suffered less, with less intensity.

Then again, if somebody had told me beforehand what I was going to go through during the devastating illness and prolonged agony of Gianpiero, all the thousand little everyday things, I wouldn’t have been able to stand the thought. Yet here I am. So it’s really true, then, you can get through anything, adapt to anything? It’s this that makes me suspect that maybe everything loses a bit of value, a bit of intensity with the passing of time. If you don’t actually die from love, perhaps it wasn’t such a great love after all, or maybe it was. So there it is, a question to which I haven’t yet found the answer.

Today, if someone brings me sad news, even very sad news, like the sudden discovery that they have a tumor, as someone did recently, my first reaction is: I’ve already been through worse. Then of course I do still suffer for the things one has to suffer for, and yet. . . .

When it comes to public affairs, I’m not so tentative. The fact that I am so angry at the state of the world doesn’t, I think, arise solely from my entirely private regret for my own lost youth. My students, who unlike me are not seventy years old, often have the same outlook on things as I do, so it must not depend on age. In any case, I try to pay close attention; I go over the list again and again from the beginning, trying to figure out if it’s all in my head, or if there’s more to it. And these appear to me objective facts, not things imagined by a peevish old man: the left today is just pathetic, from D’Alema to Rutelli to Bertinotti; and, scandalously, the CIA can now run around Italy doing whatever it likes as never before. And the war, and Bush, and Berlusconi. . . . I don’t really think you can dismiss all that as the aches and pains of old age. Not mine anyway.

Lebenszeit und Weltzeit is the title of Hans Blumenberg’s book on Edmund Husserl. The tempo of life and the tempo of the world. It’s clear that we are always living at these two tempos simultaneously. Nevertheless it is still possible to state something about the present. Not something absolute, but something that is true, true for me, true for us, shareable and verifiable, albeit within the paradigms of our historicity, our culture, our language.

Weak thought is not unconnected with these queries. From “weak thought” to “weak passion”? Perhaps. But not in the sense of unimportant, just as weak thought is quite the opposite of “unimportant,” whatever others may say. A motto I’ve repeated for years, smash down the walls instead of smashing your head (like I almost did on my birthday, and not metaphorically), might also signify this kind of self-protection against pain. Yet the suspicion nags. A slight disquiet.

I think and say all these things without taking myself too seriously. I live with a moderate, almost apocalyptic, optimism. Who knows if things will go better? I have always been a believer in providence (whether the providence of God or of things in general I don’t know) but I’m certainly not all that pessimistic about the chances of the world going to ruin.

I don’t think that everything will necessarily keep getting worse and worse. I don’t have complete faith in myself, or history, or my contemporaries. Luckily the world hasn’t been entrusted either to me or exclusively to Bush.

I sometimes listen to that poem by Bertolt Brecht that Kurt Weill set to music: “On the floor of the Moldau the stones roll along / Three Kaisers lie buried in Prague. / In this world nothing remains the same / The longest of nights comes to an end.”

And for sure, I feel free like never before. Free to say whatever I think. That I do. And this is one of the many things for which I’m not forgiven, either by my enemies or by my friends. I can say that D’Alema belongs on the scrap heap, and I can tell Vanity Fair that I have fallen in love with a cubist in his twenties. I do it because of this exceptional freedom (which might also be a dividend of old age), not because of a taste for provocation or exhibitionism, or even out of the kind of capriciousness that old people need to be protected against, like children. People reproach me: “Why on earth do you do it?” Or: “What’s driving you? You could be an august sage and you flaunt yourself like that.” I just grin. I do it because I feel free. Because I am free. And it’s something I cherish. Finally. No more fear, no more mediation, no more vulnerability to pressure, no more fear of hurting my mother or Gianpiero. With no church or party. How sweet it is.