Free... to have to return

Acceleration by Stefano Lavorini

«This summer is also over and we are back…and its time to start up again».This the opening phrase of our September editorial of some years ago, but it gives me the cue for a trip down memory lane, taking a look at what I wrote over the years after the summer break, with the doubt that many are the things – the same things - still left to be done.

It is time that laziness and idleness, curious and credible factors capable of arousing thoughts that would otherwise never spring to mind, inexorably give way to a continuous bustle, to a busy producing, to a committed connecting up, to the expediency of comprises as effective as they are difficult to make.
And there is little use in harbouring the suspicion …. of being hostage of an obtuse condition, that has us spend a good part of our lives preoccupied more with doing rather than being.

Elias Canetti wrote: «Mankind has gathered all the wisdom of his predecessors, and look how stupid he is!» Could that be true?

But never mind, it’s up to us drive away these matters; we ought to start thinking that we would be right in trying to live a bit better everyday, instead of invoking and awating an uncertain and ephemeral compensation that might be bestowed on us from time to time.

Where?
«In a place where nobody has a half life, where there is no sadness or anxiety, where no-one is alone and forced to implore being loved. A place where one can pass ones time without anguished periods of waiting, without concealed tenderness, without painful remorse. Where life becomes beautiful through fulfilling our desires, where one is able to treasure the gifts of chance and one is able to change ones goal, following luck and fate, and this while going beyond the unpredictable nature of events and the limitations of reason. Where what we would like, occurs just the way we imagined it. Where fairy-tales are reality and not just fiction».

But perhaps we had better not persevere down this road:

«For this reason I will spare you... the debasing repetition of subjects dear to me; subjects that those that have the failing of wondering as to the sense of things know well…
Hence making proud display of trite expediency, I here announce that, according to the latest news:
- boiled fish is more digestible than fried fish;
- “animelle” have nothing to do with sheep or even animals in general, but are the basis of a tasty Roman dish;
- The (in-between) seasons are no more.
I hope I again haven’t given way to rash judgements or romantic/existential considerations. If this is yet again the case, please forgive my vision of the facts, the result of my chronic shortsightedness, or perhaps a lack of wanting to grow up that has dogged me ever since I was a child.
I confess I can only place my hopes,  in the new laser surgery technology that seems to be able to restore capacities hitherto considered irremediably lost: sight to the blind, the intellect to the foolish.
In my heart I am a little sceptical that so much can be achieved and that, for example, those that derive pleasure or interest in prevaricating over others can switch to freely romping in the field of virtue without paying their forfeit. Certainly… all may be, as St Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus teaches us».

That is to say.
«Thank God the holidays are over. At last we have an entire year to go back to dreaming how our lives ought to be…».