WINTER 2015/2016

10/12/2015

As soon as I returned to my home city, after the evacuation imposed by the Second World War, during the last three years of elementary school I was lucky to have a veteran of the First World War as a teacher, an invalid with wooden hands in place of his own, destroyed by a bomb on the Karst Plateau. Master Anzola truly was a master, cultured, kind, who molded those whippersnappers into a group that loved each other and who belted out “Va pensiero” without too many off-key notes. I thought that, guided culturally by a victim of the Great War, having escaped without consequences from the Nazi occupation of the Second World War, I would be exempted from living through other conflicts. I was mistaken.
Man is too imperfect to be able to live in peace.
We’ve learned that the “historical moments” of which we remember what we were doing when these events took place in the world are all too frequent: we all know where we were when Kennedy was killed, when the Twin Towers were attacked, when the Charlie Hebdo humorists were killed, when they machine-gunned the youths at the Bataclan in Paris.
What is happening to the world? Why do we only recall massacres, slaughters, bombs and attacks?
We cannot accept that positive and just models are shot down by hordes of fanatics inspired by a hate they’ve mistaken for a god.
Equilibrium is missing. Being in equilibrium doesn’t mean staying still: a tightrope walker is able to cross the rope by holding a long pole that flexes here and there. We also understood that when we learned how to ride a bicycle. Equilibrium also means to sway, but not too much, to not lose the center of gravity.
Two quotes can help us in this unbalanced time: the first is by Henry Miller. “I soon discovered that the world can’t be changed. The best that can be done is to learn how to live in equilibrium with it”. The second is by Haruki Murakami: “Equilibrium in itself is good”.
All it takes is that each person try to explain what is happening to the world to a five-year old child. I think they would know how to find the right words. But if they don’t find the words, because so many have already been spoken, a caress and a smile for that child would be enough.