Hi friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
I think of writing as a way of molding time into something that looks familiar. Left unwritten for too long, days, weeks and years quickly turn into a monolith where memories are compressed into a single dark matter. When I look back on a random week, it is no longer just a date on the calendar, it is the week I wrote about fasting, spotting fake quotes or meditating with a dishwasher.
Until next time,
Florian
Weekly Wisdom
📚 The Little Virtues: My aunt gifted me this book (Ciao Franca👋🏻). It’s a special kind of joy to read a book that profoundly resonates and would have never otherwise crossed your path. I often wonder how many of these are out there whose pages I’ll never lay eyes on. But enough with the fomo. The Little Virtues is a short collection of essays by Italian author Natalia Ginzburg on her life as a writer, woman, mother and partner to an anti-fascist militant. I found fragments of wisdom in each and every one of them. In the opening essay, she recounts the winter spent in the mountains of Abruzzo with her kids, hiding away from the fascist regime. It’s only at the end of the chapter that we learn that her husband has died in prison, tortured by the police. It ends with this sentence that I cannot get out of my head:
“My husband died in Rome, in the prison of Regina Coeli, a few months after we left the Abruzzi. Faced with the horror of his solitary death, and faced with the anguish which preceded his death, I ask myself if this happened to us—to us, who bought oranges at Giro’s and went for walks in the snow. At that time I believed in a simple and happy future, rich with hopes that were fulfilled, with experiences and plans that were shared. But that was the best time of my life, and only now that it has gone from me forever—only now do I realize it.”
🌊 In Waves: My brother is my go-to source when I’m in the mood for a graphic novel and don’t know what to pick. This was one of his recommendations and as always, it was spot on. In Waves is the history of surfing in Hawaii interlaced with the author’s experience of love and loss. I read it in one sitting but the simple beauty of the book lingers on.
Lateral Thought
“As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know”.
Natalia Ginzburg