38	A SAFE PAIR OF HANDS

When it comes to personalities I don’t esteem, I get irritated, but in the end I lose interest. Early on Pareyson warned me about another aspect of power: “As long as you don’t occupy a real place in the world, everyone’s your friend; when you do start gaining a place, watch out.” Indeed. Indeed I can’t even get one of my students an academic job anymore. Because you need alliances, and I’m a “maestro without portfolio.”

But with the others, with the real “greats,” with persons for whom I feel admiration and gratitude, I’ve discovered that inside I bear a conventio ad excludendum against myself, a doubt that rationally I know I oughtn’t to have. But that I do have. Does it come from my class roots, too? From some psychological insecurity? From both? I don’t know. I do know for sure that when Gadamer wrote me letters full of respect and consideration, when Rorty stated that I had understood things and praised me for a difficult job well done, I was surprised to find myself asking: Who knows if they’re saying that because they mean it, or from courtesy? Almost a feeling that I’m secretly putting one over on them, as though it were all a bluff. I know it’s not, and yet this insecurity periodically surfaces.

It could also be read as a form of “weak happiness,” as an offshoot of my stupor at having got where I am, and where I certainly never dreamed I would get.

With people in general it’s like that. On one hand, faced with an attack full of gratuitous hatred, I think, with childish surprise: How can they not be fond of someone like me? On the other, I always think that I’m incapable of winning over anyone, of deserving anyone’s affection. If someone does show me affection, simply and naturally and without expecting anything in return, I almost wonder how it’s possible. But it’s because I’m the sort who, for example during the work on the Enciclopedia filosofica, was able to calm down even Livio Garzanti when he flew into a rage. Paolo De Benedetti, who worked at Garzanti, always used to say, “You’re a safe pair of hands.”

I know my own fragilities and insecurities all too well.