A Place to Live

by Natalia Ginzburg

  After childhood I got bored with made-up people. It was much more rewarding to fill my dreams with real people.

  For a long time, we think we must be the only one in the world with a fantasy life. Later on we realize it’s something lots of people have, maybe even everyone.

  In childhood and youth, we loved to arouse pity, both in ourselves and in others: it yielded rich, voluptuous feelings. Feeling sorry for ourselves and having others feel sorry for us made us feel loved. We would murmur sympathetic words to ourselves at great length. In old age, our compassion for ourselves is barren, absentminded and arid, while the sympathy of others provokes a strange mixture of gratitude and repulsion. Even the gratitude is arid and absentminded. The repulsion is stronger. When others feel sorry for us, we turn away.

  In childhood and youth, we loved to be envied. In old age, the idea of inciting envy leaves us cold as ice.

  In our youthful fantasies, pity and envy sprang up at our feet like grass, and it felt wonderful to walk on that carpet of grass. But above all we loved to inspire amazement. Amazement is the opposite of indifference, and since in real life we were often pained to meet with—or think we were meeting with—indifference, we loved to have people regard us with amazement, and we strewed it all through our fantasies. In our fantasy life, we cultivated everything lacking, or in short supply, in our real life.

  After childhood we gave up the swarming crowds; we gave up piecing our fantasies together with scraps of sentimental romances, preferring the company of a small group of people chosen from real life and transported to fantasy. Only there, we discovered, were we finally freed of our awkwardness. There, in our daydreams, we finally managed to speak to those people loud and clear, to form close and intimate connections, and to rid ourselves of the sadness that had come over us at the end of childhood, making us look back on that childhood as a lost and blessed time. Now, in our fantasies, we rarely laughed out loud and only occasionally whispered, yet the room would be filled with laughter and whispering while we sat motionless, praying only that no one would come in. Our imaginary voice resounded in the silence of our mind, our imaginary gestures were graceful and free. We realized, then, how choked and impoverished our actual relationships were, how crude and stingy our gestures, how rare and faint our words. Comparing our fantasy life with real life, we found the former to be infinitely more fulfilling. And in its midst, we were free at last. But we were unable to bring any of that force and grace into our real life. Indeed the memory of the fantasy life, in which we had appropriated real people for our personal use, capriciously moving them around and wrenching them in and out of place like objects, made us even sadder, gawkier, and more cowardly in real life, in the presence of real people.

  The goal of our existence, we believed, was to become in actuality the person we were in fantasy. We thought that by training ourselves to behave freely and courageously in fantasy, we would one day attain real grace and freedom. Our fantasy life seemed a kind of gymnastic training, by which we would finally learn a better way of being in the world. We were mistaken: in actual life, the memory of our fantasies weighed heavily on us. When we put them side by side, fantasy life and real life, their huge disparity sent chills down our spine.

  Once transported to our dreams, real people kept their own characteristics, only in a paler, milder, less distinct form. They became gentler, always ready to agree with us, keenly attentive to our every bad mood or melancholy, easy to get along with, submissive, patient, and disposed to make every sacrifice on our behalf. Not only did we improve immensely in our daydreams, but others improved as well, and the very temperature of the air was better, never too cold or too hot, so that we never sweated or went numb with cold but were forever basking in a benign, balmy atmosphere. The only disturbing notion was that all those people we were using in our dreams might in real life have all sorts of chores and worries and preoccupations; they might even be having nervous fits or temper tantrums at the very moment we were arranging their bodies in calm, smiling poses suitable for temperate conversation. In their actual presence we felt a kind of remorse, as if they had been exploited unawares, and as if clouds of flies or mosquitoes might erupt from our dreams to plague us all. And the fact that these people were totally ignorant of inhabiting our dreams was more troubling than reassuring, because for us the mind had a real existence, however hidden; it existed and partook of the truth, and its secret, invisible nature rendered it even more insolent and distressing vis-à-vis reality.

  In the realm of dream, our constant fear of never being the protagonist, of remaining always in a walk-on role, disappeared. In the realm of dream we promptly and resolutely took center stage in the universe. We kindled ardent and profound feelings in everyone around us. The scenario of our eventful lives was enhanced by incredulous, bedazzled testimonies to our high and extraordinary destiny. We chose one person from our real life to stand alongside us as fellow protagonist, while others, those who in reality inspired fear and veneration, became spectators or were assigned bit parts. This filled us with a mad joy that felt quite strange, insolent, possibly even criminal, but we wouldn’t have given it up for anything in the world. Nor would we have revealed it to a living soul for anything in the world.

  In childhood, we thought that above all, our fantasies should conjure up and dwell on our own happiness. We dressed up in elegant new costumes and frequented fantastic places—fabulously opulent houses, parks and meadows with roving peacocks, where astoundingly white sheep grazed and stupendous horses galloped. After childhood, though, happiness began to bore us. Our dreams took to brooding far more often on our ruin. Our great dread in real life was to appear comic rather than tragic; we dreaded that whatever fate had in store for us might fall under the mask of comedy and not tragedy. In our fantasies, therefore, we would offer our destiny the gift of great and somber disasters. Dressed in mourning, we followed the funeral cortege of both our parents, while people stroked our poor, orphaned head. In reality, sitting at the dinner table with our parents, we would recall how we had just buried them; watching them eat and exchange their placid remarks, we would think how firmly riveted to happiness our real life was, this life in which the absence of funerals, indeed of any events at all, was quite remarkable.

  After childhood, more and more often our fantasies would find us in the grip of complex, perilous situations, with no chance of escape. We would be capsized in a torrent of calamities. We invented protracted illnesses—we had pneumonia and coughed up blood—long exiles in the most depressing hospital wards, heartrending partings from those we held most dear. We even died. Stabbed in our very own doorway. Shot. Imprisoned and visited by tearful friends as we lay on our filthy pallet, while outside the gallows awaited us, the tocsin rang out, and people flocked from every direction to watch us die. For long spells, our dreams were always the same. Once in a while we might alter some small detail, changing the various friends who came to weep or adding to their number, or altering a line in the script here and there, perhaps our final serene words before being put to death. For quite some time there was the gallows, then for a good while it was the barricades. We couldn’t account for the changes in the scenario: they didn’t feel like our own doing. The will to dream was our own, the choice of characters was definitely our own, but the scenarios and the events seemed beyond our control. It was we who invented them, but in obedience to some murky instinct compelling us to invent in this or that mode.

  In childhood, our imaginary scenes and settings were richly colored, and we would linger over every tiny detail. We had to know what everyone was wearing, which animals were present, and how the furniture in the houses was arranged, not to mention the trees in the parks. Once the whole scene was set, we would fall into a trance, lost in contemplation as if on our knees, dazzled by the brilliance of the sky, the sumptuousness of the colors. After childhood our mode of dreaming changed utterly. All precision of detail was gone. Now the essential features were scantness of invention, swiftness, and
tonelessness. Since we considered ourselves blessed with imagination, it seemed strange that the more brief and barren our fantasies were, the more stripped and unadorned the scenarios, the more joy they would yield; even if they were tragic and bloody, still their rhythm and pace were too swift to allow much room for a rich luxuriance of facts. The scenarios were unadorned because we no longer enjoyed lingering over colors and furnishings. Colors and furnishings were boring. If our blood flowed, it was colorless.

  The episodes always started and ended at the same point, like a song on a record. They were always inconclusive; we would watch them trail off in the shadows like the tail of a fish. Even our death didn’t signal a conclusion, because it was followed by bells, tears, and genuine outbursts of grief from those we had selected for precisely that purpose. Still, it was impossible to get beyond that inconclusive point. We would go back and repeat it all over again from the beginning. Despite the sameness of it all, we were never bored. A few very minor changes sufficed. We would emerge from our fantasies wide-eyed, dazed, unsatisfied, with the fleeting vision of that inconclusive ending.

  We’ve often felt scorn for our fantasy life. Its path, we thought, strayed far from any intellectual choice. It strayed far from our moral life. It carried all the rubbish of our mind. There were times, in our fantasies, when we behaved generously: we could be charitable, heroic, ready for every sacrifice and martyrdom. But we could be bitchy, and acting bitchy gave us an unbridled joy. Our fantasy life clearly harbored our worst features: our cruelty, vanity, boastfulness, laziness. Our endless fantasies and our indulgence of them could only spread sloth and indulgence in the life of the spirit.

  We sometimes wondered if there was any relationship between the fantasy life and the creative life. They inhabited the same realm, the realm of imagination. Moreover, they both grew and ripened in idleness and solitude.

  In periods of creative activity, our fantasy life usually ceased to exist—usually, but not always. Creative activity required a profound silence, while the fantasy life resounded with whispers, voices, bursts of laughter. Also, we used to feel that in periods of creativity, our personal destiny should be a matter of indifference to us, and so it was distressing to find that that was not always the case. Sometimes we would take breaks, pausing in our work to invent scenarios as a gift for our destiny, or to amuse ourselves by long talks with imaginary interlocutors, carrying on our fantasy life as always, which we found an extremely base practice. We called it work, but it felt no different from idleness. The only discernible difference between our idle fantasy life and the creative life was that in the creative life our mind would buzz and sting as if crowded with needles and bees. Our fantasy life held no needles or bees: our mind was vacant, smoothly fluid. Lastly, the creative life produced or might produce work. The fantasy life was sterile and would never produce a thing. But frankly, in youth this was not an appreciable difference, since quite often what we called work didn’t produce anything either.

  All the same, we thought on occasion that if we hadn’t had a fantasy life, we might not have found the path to the creative life, or it wouldn’t have occurred to us to seek it. We never did manage to learn, in our fantasy life, the proper ways to behave in real life, but we did find a few random tools useful for the creative life: a special kind of attentiveness, a cast of mind at once authoritative and reverent in manipulating elements of reality. The creative life was the best thing we possessed, the fantasy life possibly the worst. But maybe they were blood relatives, inseparable one from the other.

  There were times when our fantasy life anticipated and foreshadowed what would later happen in real life. But its predictions were a mockery. If years later we compared some of our inventions with our actual experience, the inventions resembled a crude caricature of what actually happened. At other times it was just the opposite. It was reality that made a mockery and caricature of our fantasies. A cruel, mocking caricature, compared to our mild, melancholy, vaporous fantasies.

  Comparing our fantasies with actual events, we were sometimes astonished by what we had dared to conceive of, what delirious and boundlessly ambitious schemes had swirled within us. Never did we see ourselves in so grotesque a guise, nor laugh at ourselves so profoundly and so bitterly as when we studied the arabesques of our ambitious imaginings in the light of what actually happened. Our laughter was vast and shocking to our ears, reverberating as it did in the silence, lacerating and harrowing, because our ears alone could register its sound.

  Over the course of our life we acquire a strong sense of the ridiculous. When we invent episodes for our destiny, we are hard put to forget that it is we who must live through them. In childhood and youth, when we abandoned ourselves to fantasy, we lost all sense of the ridiculous.

  Growing old, we have no idea what will become of our fantasy life, our stubborn habit of dreaming, contracted in the farthest reaches of childhood. If in the course of our life we ever played the role of protagonist, now, in old age, we feel sure this will no longer happen. And no doubt in others’ lives we’ll play minor roles: witnesses, walk-ons, spectators. Not even in our secret fantasies will we play an essential part. Our every dream will be lightless. Impossible to turn on the light, the wires being frayed, impossible to build a stage in our ravaged theaters. This, we realize, must be old age. Making the gesture of turning on the lights and remaining in the dark.

  In youth, we very seldom thought about growing old. When we did happen to think about it, we assumed old age would so totally transform us that we would be unrecognizable even to ourselves. We believed we would become resolute, sturdy, and totally tranquil. Our aged self was a stranger, and the fate of this stranger was none of our concern. Her face, her voice, her thoughts were all alien to us. In expectation of turning into this stranger, we prepared ourselves for a solid, quiet old age, as one prepares oneself for a long and comfortable therapeutic stay at a health spa. Instead, old age knocked us over like a gust of wind. It battered at our errors, our ineptness, our rashness, incoherence, and frailty. It brought no remedy for our failings. They are even more apparent to us, and more unforgivable to others. Nor have we become strangers. Our essential nature has not changed in the least. It is still we ourselves who must endure old age: its transformations of body and spirit have been enormous and profound, but not such as to render us unrecognizable. The deepest core of our spirit is exactly the same. We observe the transformations and ravagings of mind and body, but we observe them with the same foolish eyes of always.

  We think that gradually we shall become hard and strict with ourselves, implacable in forbidding any flights of fancy or intellectual frivolity. We’ll close the door on the fantasy life, the way you close the doors and the shutters to go to sleep.

  But instead, in idle moments we still set about inventing imaginary places, out of ancient habit. Wearily, we sit down. Our imagination has grown timid, cold, cautious. In real life we may be somewhat less timid, but now it’s our imagination that is timid. What are we to do now, in idle moments, with such a cold and timid imagination, shut up in imaginary rooms where nothing more happens?

  In old age, we’re afraid of forgetting what happiness was all about. We think our vision of the world will be forever incomplete now, forever murky and truncated. There was a moment in our life when we grasped that never again would we be happy; destiny might hold all sorts of things in store, but not happiness, not anymore. A moment like that draws a dividing line in our life, a deep, black furrow. To remember happiness, we have to look at the stretch of land beyond that furrow. Our memories remain. But memories offer only a few scattered traces of happiness. We find it hard to reconstruct a complete image of it. The feelings we remember seem too exalted and passionate, compared to happiness. We’re afraid of possibly forgetting the real nature of happiness, that state we dwelt in as in our natural element, so natural, so self-evident, and so real that in the end we even made bad use of it.

  In memory, what is present and what is lost are inextr
icably linked. The same faraway red sun shines on our every distant memory, whether of grief or happiness. It makes each trivial moment of our past precious and luminous. It is impossible for us, ever again, to enjoy the privilege of living in that realm, amid that splendor. It is so far away that we can’t even summon up the warmth of its rays on our cold sands.

  When we were in love, our fantasy life took on immense significance. Dreams blossomed in our mind like the first spring flowers on a tree, and we scattered them over our destiny in profusion. We felt rash, bestowing this gift, for we understood that our destiny was at a delicate point where even a single flower might damage it. And yet we couldn’t turn our mind to stone. We couldn’t stop it from blossoming.

  In old age, we’re afraid of forgetting what love was all about. We do remember that it could come in two modes. It could come suddenly, setting fire to the world. Or it could come almost unnoticed, the color of air. Love was either like air or like fire.

  When it was like air, we could recognize it by certain signs. The swiftness of the hours; our light breathing; the great pleasure we took in performing the smallest and most banal tasks, straightening out a drawer or going out to mail a letter—tedious, numbing tasks that ordinarily, on our gray days, bored us to death. Our fantasy life stayed the same, or was even more crowded with incident. But it kept within the bounds of reason. We felt strong, intelligent, calm.