104. The generic idea of brotherhood or fraternity (Enlightenment), but also the more concrete idea of neighbor (Jesus), seems to ignore or put little stock in the fact that it is in fact proximity that most engenders hatred, and that discord and rivalry among equals can push humans to persecution and to murder. It is not the Other, the one who is different, but rather the one who is most similar who unleashes conflict. So it always has been from the most remote and mythical origins, and it still functions in that exact way. It is your next-door neighbor who drives you crazy with his dog that barks the whole night through, not an Aboriginal in far-off Australia. As always, Jesus with His precepts seems to announce the obvious, what’s taken for granted, while His teachings remain that much more daring and provocative, wrapped as they are in that quasi-childishness: He knows perfectly well that you hate your next-door neighbor and that you’d gladly hang him from the highest tree, and so He orders you to love him. He never talks about the grand clashes between nations, but rather of the small and incessant conflict that is unleashed on a daily basis in a few dozen square feet: the room where brothers sleep, the boundary of a field of alfalfa. To say “Love thy neighbor” actually means “Love who you detest.”
105. Being-close, that is, being-neighbors is the foundation upon which hatred is built and where it flourishes.
106. Hatred is by no means turned against those who are different, but rather against the dangerously similar: the anti-Semitism of Drieu la Rochelle is never turned against the bearded man with long curls and a fur hat, but rather against men of letters and journalists like him, whom he encounters in restaurants . . .
107. Hatred isn’t a reaction to something, it’s a basic need.
108. The nightmare of acquaintances: exactly who are my acquaintances, really? And if I’ve known them for a long time but in reality I frequent them only sporadically, running into them by chance or obligation, is that because, deep down, they get on my nerves? Otherwise, why haven’t they become my friends, genuine friends? And why, instead of “acquaintances,” aren’t they called, as would be more logical, “acquainteds”?
111. The doctrine of “But we didn’t know” ought to be replaced with the admission “We knew everything, but we just didn’t want to acknowledge what was obvious.”
114. Political ideologies are not perfect doctrines rationally conceived for the good of humanity, even if they more often than not choose to present themselves as such. They are, instead, formations of struggle that have emerged from hostility and resentment, in periods of crisis, where what counts most are enthusiasm and anger.
115. Contradiction in the morality of strength, in the figure of the warrior. He is invoked as the defender of society and tradition, whereas he is actually their disintegrator. There is nothing more savage and ungovernable than a warrior, caught in the purity of his one exclusive deed, namely, killing. His essence is found in devastation, certainly not in preservation. Marte (Italian for the god Mars) means nothing other than Morte (Italian for “death”). The same thing happens in Latin, Mars and Mors. Similarly in English, “martial” and “mortal.” And in all herculean figures, that is, those figures characterized by the use of force, force itself knows no limits, nor any preset use that can be called in advance either good or bad; it is nameless and directionless; it can be used to alleviate the destiny of humans, in beneficial undertakings, as well as to commit horrible and senseless massacres. The warrior is always impure, always bloodstained, and often the blood in question is the blood of innocents. The hero kills not only dangerous monsters who threaten the helpless, but also the helpless themselves, defenseless women and children and men, or even his own family, in the throes of the same blindness that allows him to hurl himself against his enemies and destroy them. It would just be too easy if you could put force on a leash! Like any other superhuman energy, just like birth, death, and love, the warrior fury defies regulation, and when it submits to it, that means that in its turn it has taken on the character of a brutal vendetta. The guilty are slaughtered by others every bit as guilty. The warrior is a crazy horse who yearns to die; his chivalrous morality inclines him to gratuitous violence: how could he be the defender of a moderate and stable society? He is one only to the extent that he is instrumentalized.
116. Heroic initiatory separation from the family, from one’s home: it was necessary to leave and stay away for years in order to become men. Today the hero can do nothing other than return home, otherwise, where would he go?
118. Aside from a few old-school gentlemen’s clubs, deep down the Catholic priesthood is nothing more than the last of those strictly male clubs which, until not all that many decades ago, loomed like fortresses, like control towers on the horizon of our society. Male separation formed not one but many untouchable Mount Athoses, in the army, in academia, in finance, in government. They’ve all been dissolved except for the priesthood. Who knows how much longer this communitarian model based on exclusion can hope to endure.
119. To me, the subjugated should not be exempted from criticism for the simple fact that they have been subjugated, indeed, this is the first criticism that ought to be directed toward them. And the last, it’s high time they stopped lazing around comfortably in the evangelical promise that they are going to be the first.
120. As boys, forging our identity in the fire of the cruelty of others or, even worse, of false friendship, or the false willingness of some adult or other, right there and willing to help you, to reach out a hand, but only in order to lead you where he wants you to go. Therefore, either you succumb to wickedness or you resist it by finding every bit as much grit and wickedness inside you, or else you let yourself by seduced by advisers with ulterior motives, until you start thinking things that you believe are your own, your own convictions, your own hopes, your own plans but which aren’t in fact yours at all, but most of all you start to hate someone whom or something which your adviser had been trying to turn you against from the very outset. The chief characteristic of the bad adviser is his sweetness, his kindness. In the midst of so many wild beasts it starts to become natural to listen to him, entrust yourself to him.
121. The private school where I taught for so many years housed a male contingent who combined the privilege of their birth into well-to-do families with a solid education capable of preparing them for a position of prominence in the adult world. All of that tempered by a catechism that, on paper, preached almost the exact opposite. It is a singular characteristic of Italian Catholicism that it carries forward an age-old tradition of defending the last and the least while, at the same time, allying itself with the worldly interests of the first and the highest. Perhaps this contradiction lies at the basis of its grandeur and its solidity. But it can’t really escape anyone’s notice, and the first ones whose notice it didn’t escape were in fact the lucky enrollees: my students.
122. If you stop to think about it, the fact that someone might harbor a baseless fear, however ridiculous it might seem, is always better than being frightened for good and solid reasons. Even if they wear at our nerves, false alarms should be preferred to the ones that precede a genuine bombing raid. This is from the point of view of cold hard reality. From the point of view of our feelings, well, it’s very different, given that we can even feel a certain sense of relief when the worst does happen, when after so many groundless worries, an authentic disaster looms on the horizon, when we stop by to pick up the medical exams we undergo periodically for routine prevention, and the values that for years had come back normal are suddenly all over the place. Damn it, but also, hooray! At last! These tragic reports are a form of reparation, at least making us appear less ridiculous to the eyes of those who have always considered our worries to be overblown—worries that we, first and foremost, had always been a little ashamed of—finally making our fear respectable, as it should be, always and in any case.
123. If you want to obtain recognition, you have to give something in exchange: even your life, in exchange for a word, a me
dal, a caress . . .
124. Some feelings are original, others are derived, but they are not for that reason any less powerful or lasting, if anything, more so. Italians are accustomed to taking their courage from anger, which can also rapidly vanish, but only after bringing to light a formidable audacity. The sentimental and personal side is so sharply accentuated that for many, in the final analysis, it becomes more important to take revenge than to win. Private passions get the better of public ones, or else they are converted into them, triumphing in the form of civic attitudes. Internal revolts do not cease to be what they are merely because they march behind a flag, and the same is true of resentment and ambition. Scratch the surface of any public statement you care to choose, and scant fractions of an inch beneath the scab of logical reasoning and a general motivation, you will find the maggot that was burrowing into the speaker. Often, there’s really no need to even scratch!
127. There’s a proverb that says: a holy place never remains empty. Perhaps it’s even more credible that an empty place sooner or later becomes holy. If material appetites overlook it for a long time, it’s destined to be occupied by holiness. Holiness and emptiness and silence and absence (of humanity, words, and signs) are by now synonymous. Thus, for example, by now the few square miles of the Italian landscape that haven’t been thoroughly ransacked are holy: they weren’t at first, often they were just barren and inhospitable places with no real significance (that’s why they were spared: they offered nothing to exploit), but now they are. Paradox would have it that the most beautiful places, overrun and captured on account of their beauty, are now the most frightening, the most horrible.
132. Homosexuality (whether latent, open, or repressed) is at the basis of immense cultural and political groundswells, from Neoclassicism to Nazism, from the Renaissance to Fashion, from the myth of the uncorrupted child to Catholic schools to the Spartan army, from attending gyms to civil rights.
133. There was a sect whose leader had announced that the world was about to be destroyed by flying saucers. The date announced for the end of the world came and went. Nothing happened. After the leader’s prophecy was shown to be wrong, the number of proselytes joining the sect, instead of declining, increased.
134. Many people who have been deceived continue to believe in the deception they fell for. Not even the most massive batch of evidence can undercut your faith in a lie, if it’s a true faith. Let’s take religious relics: even if they weren’t authentic, the fact that they have been venerated for so long and with such faith is enough to make them sacred.
137. They say that misfortune is a good school: perhaps. But happiness is the best university (quote from a letter from Pushkin to his wife, Natalia, March 1834).
138. Instinctive annoyance toward what is “too close,” fascination with what is “moderately distant,” fear toward the “absolutely remote.”
139. I realize, now that I am about to die, that I can no longer stand it when people come talk to me or argue with me about anything serious or grave. Nor can I stand to listen to them on television or read them. I prefer the sound of words to have little meaning or none at all, and do nothing more than remind me what the human voice is like, and not the concepts that it utters. In certain cases, perhaps in nearly all, it is pious and just to speak without saying anything.
142. However far back you may be able to venture with your memory and forward with your hopes, and however much you may be able thus to move along the axis of time, the present is not easily stripped of its immense power of attraction.
143. Ideas should always be developed to the full extent of their range, out of a curiosity to see where they lead us, and to discover that the most interesting ones lead to a dead point, while those which at first seem less brilliant have greater possibilities of leading to a genuine revelation. You can only run into a genuine revelation along the way, or near the end point, while many naïvely believe that that’s the starting point.
145. The more dismal the life we actually lead, the greater the alluring distinction between ours and the life we’re convinced we have every right to live. The dreary realism of everyday existence serves as a propellant for our fantasy lives, the products of which are entered into the ledger of not only possible things, but things that are due us, things that sooner or later we will attain, once we have removed the temporary stumbling blocks.
146. First they fired their guns and then, depending on what they had hit, they would say that that was the target.
147. Prisoners of heuristics: which presupposes that there is a meaning to every individual thing just as to the whole, and that you can, indeed that you must find it. And what if there is no meaning? What if no meaning ever existed? If we no longer had any obligation to seek it out, then what would become our duty?
149. Ability, confidence, brilliance—all deployed for the creation and diffusion of garbage. That is the way the lion’s share of talent is invested. Since technical skills are in and of themselves praiseworthy, independent of the field in which they’re applied and the ends to which they’re put, you will often hear people say that this or that person is “outstanding,” “truly at the top of their game,” or “a serious professional,” that they’re “freaks of nature,” because in point of fact they show great ability at their trades, they tend to complete their projects successfully—something that, all things considered, could also be said of Jack the Ripper and Adolf Eichmann. Dominated as we are, even in the domain of our imagination, by the considerations of success, efficiency, and productivity as applied to every walk of life, we wind up admiring anything that has been “well done,” “accomplished.” But if at a certain point you grow impatient and blurt out that a certain person is a “genuine piece of shit,” both because of who and what they are and because of the things they produce—be they TV programs or buildings or clothing or songs or newspaper articles or TV commercials—all too often the response is the disarming argument, “Hey now, the one thing you can’t say is that they’re stupid!”
151. Adolescence is the period during which we are most acutely incapable of recognizing an all-too-simple principle, namely that our actions and our thoughts aren’t actually tremendously and wonderfully unique, but instead ordinary, all too common. But then, perhaps, we might say the same thing of adults and even old people, as well as every other intermediate phase that goes to make up existence. After all, life is made up of passages, intervals, crossings, so that we never occupy a sufficiently solid position to be able to judge all the rest objectively: they strike us as obstacles and battles, but if that’s what they seem, then that’s what they really are.
153. What an enormous waste of intelligence there is, both in understanding and in refusing to understand.
154. Those who love humanity with an abstract love almost always love only themselves.
155. Like in the first century in ancient Rome, likewise in the years I’ve been assigned to live in, so many illogical faiths teem throughout society, populating the world with demons, deceiving enormous masses of people about the imminent advent of portentous new developments, promising this and threatening that and brandishing evocative enchantments, so that many naïve people were defrauded by the false prophets and charismatic leaders who were propagandizing these ideas. Unlike in ancient times, when cultivated souls were able to withstand the spread of these lies, really suitable only for fools and the illiterate, in the contemporary era many intelligent and learned people, variously intellectuals, philosophers, writers, artists, and scientists, instead of taking care not to be deceived by these fairy tales, quite to the contrary, chose to pay them heed, embracing them as if blinded and preaching them with an even greater enthusiasm than that manifested by the ignorant, thus contributing to the credibility of the most deluded illusory ideas with the force of their intellect and the arguments of their culture. Culture served in any case not to give these lies a proper critical examination but only to reinforce them with lines of reasoning as defective as they were
convincing: intelligence used its resources to elevate nonsensical persiflage to the status of theories, and its arrogance to defend them against any objections.
156. I’ve come to the conclusion that the Trojan War was really fought to take back Helen. It wasn’t about commercial hegemony! She was the reason, just as the myth tells us, and in fact mythology always tells the truth, and may occasionally be even more realistic than history.
157. Even many years later, after reading many books and doing much hard thinking, I’m still stuck with the impression I had as a boy, perhaps unfounded but very powerful, namely that the Greeks produced far greater depth and meaning in their mythology than with all their renowned philosophy. I’m not talking about mere beauty of language. I’m referring to an intellectual contribution, an effort at the interpretation of the meaning of life, the depth and originality of a view of the world. The fact that the stories in question are fairy tales does nothing to undercut their meaning; if anything it enhances it. Further evidence supporting this view is the fact that the most relentless detractor of the ancient myths and their bard, Homer, should never have done anything other to illustrate his theories than to come up with new myths, and that is how he is remembered, starting in classrooms: the Myth of the Cave, the Myth of the Androgyne, the Myth of the Horses That Pull in Irreconcilable Directions: which frankly strikes me as fairly improbable . . . drab . . . their images, peregrine . . . when compared with ancient myths. Unless, that is, we are to consider philosophy itself as something not so much as a break with the mythical vision, but rather its mere continuation, sparer, more faded, bureaucratic, specialized, sterilized with respect to the carefree overabundance of the origins.
158. For some individuals, only violent action can wholly restore the sentiment of freedom: it is at that point that the sexual impulse and the political frenzy converge (here it seems unmistakable that he is referring to the perpetrators of the CR/M).
The Catholic School Page 146
