...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... //

The wordpress dashboard says I have 72 drafts, which means snippets of unfinished or discarded posts. I want to do away with this stuff 'cause 72 is a big number when it comes to things you hadn't the guts to publish nor to erase. Before I suddenly die-- and someone can read the stuff in its entirety-- I feel I have to get rid of it. And while I proceed with the liquidation, I'm saving bits of it because I'm a weak person.

// ...the problem is that a personality is a very complex thing, larger than the world itself, it has all the colors of the rainbow and no color at all.
--On a given day it can show you any unpredictable, insufferable face and leave you with a fist of flies.
Physical beauty instead decays only in time, and evidently much more resistant and reassuring --because it is less complex-- is what you are left to wish when your gracious girl makes you mad with her personality.
The solution? dive into the personality until it feels warmer again than the cool outside. Or vice versa. (i.e. no solution) //

// ..."I know Milan's cathedral is so huge," she says. "This must look like a small toy to you."
"Actually I hate Milano's cathedral," I says. "I think that the larger the church, the less religion is in it. That's why the largest church in the world is in Rome, you know?" //

// ...reading a news item like this one, refreshed the mother-daughter threesome fantasy in my mind . The fantasy had been planted there a long ago by Sade's novels and certain comics and other erotica, of course, and was never completely silent (...) --but I'm sure one would come up with it even without the help of all those who came before--
Then it mixed up with recent readings like Elfriede Jelinek's "The Piano Teacher" and developed into this threesome fantasy where the daughter, to find the strength to undergo all the perversions of the man (which is you) begs her mother to mistreat her and insult her and force her in various ways to do the things (...) because that's their menage and you, being the man, cannot but follow their game, you're not guilty or anything //

// ...The city was so calm and windy around, the streets emptied and dark against the glowing lights of the open restaurants, and the synagogue was outlined, the gigantic tribunal in the back, the silent trees around the hospital where my sister was born, Liceo Berchet, Philippine church, the front yards of via Orti, the graffiti, the avenues, it was all there, beautiful as it is when there's almost nobody around using it. The air was cool, and the noises remote in the blinking of the unseen semaphores, and I think Milano could have lighten that walk, so heavy and paranoid as it was. Typically I wasn't really cooperating //