...more excerpts from deleted or discarded drafts.

// Well, I always hated that novel not just for its content, which is quite trivial although beautifully written, but for the title: the so sad, simplistic idea that there is someone who "is not a man" like you are, and it's your enemy. Pathetic, because Vittorini actually defends the idea: some are not men for him, and that's why you ought to fight them. Maybe he hated women? who knows.
My feeling about this book is always: being 'not men'? what's so relevant about men? Why are men the touchstone for everything? When he wrote that book the world was just coming out of years of tragedy, and it was all men's idea! //

// I bet insomnia is related to that. When we sleep less and less, even leading a very quiet life, it's also because probably we have few things or no thing significant to remember in the arc of the day; that means, our brain couldn't learn nothing really of importance. Our mind of course recorded a lot of things, but they probably were too similar too other things already recorded in the past. So, the brain says, let's stay awake until something significant possibly pops out. //

// I shrug. I said something out of tune like "you mean, in our lives actually?" I look at her perfectly oval face and her dark eyes. Her hair shimmering sporadically by the low golden light. She has a small gleaming line of skin that moves from the base of her nose to the side but I can see it only when she doesn't talk. I try to imagine her breasts under the green cappotto. See, when you don't know what to do or say, you can always imagine the breasts. //

// banal as a jumping rope / does not need no funny dope / to get you higher than a tope / (five hours of sleep are all I can hope) //

// The point won't ever be, pick the right thing for me, but, pick the right thing to trigger a rewarding mechanism from them. For example, it is often desirable to pick a career near to at least one of the parents' careers --or failed ambitions-- in order to trigger rewarding mechanisms from them more easily. Also, if punishment and misunderstanding is more frequent than rewards, going in the opposite direction and doing everything to disappoint them still means that your story depends on choices made by someone else. and it's screwed just the same. //

// It's for the intense metaphor it seems to stage, the vast desert of our lives, into our heads our hearts this society, among the others who are not there, without any tool good to help us with maybe a friend around, as inept as we are, ending up taking the worst decisions when it's not even necessary to take them anymore.
And, is there any actual way to leave this recurrent, obvious, vast desert? To reach a different place? It doesn't really seems so... //