"It's been years since I'd remembered how good a castagnaccio can taste, longer even since I'd sat in the fields and really looked at a night sky. I didn't know I'd surrendered all of my mystery and damn near all my defiance. Did you know it's defiance that keeps a man optimistic? Without his secrets, his rebellions, his little vendettas against another man or against the same wild hare who eludes him three days in a row, against hunger, against time itself - if he loses these, he loses his voice. I'm faded, spent, yet I'm young and eager. Or is that only memory? I was born for, built for, a certain life that no longer exists. Oh, I don't mean that all of it's gone. Some of the appetites for life as it used to be still survive but it's not the same. Can't be the same. There's an emptiness that comes with plenty. It's that same sprezzatura, that nonchalance we've talked about before. I feel hollow and dulled most of the time, as though it's only in the past that I can find myself. I'm my own ancestor. I'm full of history but I have no present. I feel like I've lasted too long, while others didn't last long enough."
Barlozzo in "A Thousand Days in Tuscany" by Marlena de Blasi
 |
| Castagnaccio © Lemonpi |
No comments:
Post a Comment