On the way to Florence
Marianna gave me Sándor Márai's Embers to take with me on my journey to Italy.
I always start reading a book with the last page, and today I made no exception. An afterword by Christina Viragh (Rome, Spring 1999):
Already in his memoir Heaven and Earth, Márai writes: 'It may be that solitude is destroying man.... But this failure, this rupture, is still more worthy of a thinking person than the attempt to curry favour with a world which at first inflames one with its temptations only then to throw one into the ditch... Remain by yourself, and answer....
I was dozing off. Many people on this earth have no choice. Every day they must fight for their survival, struggle to make a living.
Many people who do have a choice live as if they did not. They live as if they will never die, as if death will never catch up with them.
Would these people live differently if they knew they were to die at forty? And I - how would I have lived the last 20 years, if I had known that I would die at 40, as a fellow pupil at the Gymnasium had prophesied?
At lunchtime I read in the local paper: "Felice é morto."
