Therefore I believe this basic assumption to be true, that falsehood is beloved; falsehood by day and dreams during the night: here's a human being.

-- from Gustave Flaubert's letters

I don't understand the world but when I am lucky I can see clearly how the world is largely unexplored and unknown -- and catch some breath: still nothing makes sense -- despite all the technique and the data-- I mean what surrounds me, what happens under the light of the day, what the souls and the bodies are doing today, what their hopes and excuses and impressions seem to be, what is consumed and missed and redone: unknown, the minds are unknown, the pains unknown, the thoughts of the cats, for example, unknown --
but then the stroll ends and you drag your feet back in the funnel where things are aimed at something and clocks tick noisily and nosily, and walks have directions, and manly hands are shaken--
 

the most relevant thing I learned at gardening school is probably that gardening doesn't pay, since it obviously is yet another job ruined by the miserable idea that we all have to work faster, faster, harder, harder, €5,20 per hour and thanks, lest we drown, uh, fear, don't even think about drowning, run, work, swim, are you a fool? so for example it doesn't really matter if you shove that lavendula in a pot you just filled with acid soil because you just have to run, christ, screw the €8 pale lavendula, someone is going to be charged for it when you replace it next year-- no fear -- what really disturbs me is that I'd take the same decisions, I'd do the same things to survive--

and the more I am attracted by the world of the plants -- taste developed not, I shall say, out of some very popular nowadays hate or disgust towards humanity, which I don't share at all, in average I still like humanity, since I don't hate myself all the time, the others are not my obstacles-- the more it seems impossible to me to fit into the proposed categories of mindless unstoppable working mania that colonized entirely the italian world of gardening, along with all the other worlds, somewhere I was so naively trying to escape going in that direction-- like if there was a direction where to go expect retire from this totally uninteresting race whose prices I don't understand and whose prizes I don't get
 

but I am accustomed to my naivety, it just makes me smile a bit-- a falta de algo mejor--
yet I never would have imagined a good, almost-imperceptible-as-it-should-be, well done pruning could give satisfaction, probably enough to a soul in need of small things like to heal itself, or to survive its own sickness a little longer--
 

post scriptum, so ends another year. this year I learned very little, right now I can only think of very depressing things like that i get more stupid, all people I can think of getting everyday more stupid, which is another way to say more scared, more defensive, less curious which in the end means less interesting. what is it happening to the world? I'll tell you what, maybe we really managed to sell ourselves to the idea that we are not worthed. like there was some very high standard we failed --and I can't really see it anywhere-- or that we are so much worthed that nobody will ever understand us, which is the same thing--

music: Django Reinhardt, Minor swings, September songs etc.

pictures: faces (always faces!) I scribbled next to the notes of arboricolture, phytopathology et al.

also: my most thankful thoughts go to all those who left comments or sent emails and got no response or lame responses. I wanted to answer you and do it in a sensible manner, but then it was hard to get it done, then it felt stupid because too much time had passed etc. you know how it goes.