64

FLASHES

Defeated on every front, I’ve never felt so free.

Cesare Annibaldi (that’s right, the Fiat executive) said to me one day, repeating a brilliant witticism of Ennio Flaiano, “Failure has gone to your head.” That must be it.

In the end, without ever having acknowledged it to myself so explicitly and so forcefully, I’ve sought freedom above all else. For me. For others. Perhaps more than love, even, more than fame and success certainly, more than power for sure, I have sought freedom. Knowing that one can be very much alone without being free, but it’s difficult to be truly free without being somewhat alone.

Perhaps this is what isn’t forgiven me.

Perhaps this is why my ultimate political adventure played itself out under the sign of Gioacchino da Fiore, in the south from which I come.

Ever more often I think back to those two lines of Hölderlin that I put at the beginning of my first book on Heidegger, more than forty years ago: “Only at moments does man bear divine fullness / dreaming of the gods continues after life.”

But with the passage of years I’ve come to think that only the second line is important.

The idea of history as illuminations and sudden swerves robs you of any claim to continuity and absolutes, but it regales you with moments of boundless intensity.

“Are you happy?” you ask me, dear Stefano, in your increasingly rare moments of tenderness. But you already know that I invariably answer you with a smile: “I’m hardly out of my mind.”

I could tell you about moments when I’ve been happy. But I didn’t know that I was.

Life is the dream of these moments of intensity. That have befallen. Constellations that freeze. For an instant.

Flashes. Traces. Fragments.