Lucky’s Reviews > The Late Mattia Pascal > Status Update

Imagination takes pleasure in proving how incredible life can be, even in such novels that, without meaning to, she copies from art.

**after the publication of this book, there were news of similar real life stories…

"In the first place," he says, "it proves that outside of the law, and without those individual characteristics which, happy or sad as they may be, make us ourselves, we cannot live, dear Signor Pascal."

I had to remain in a fine situation, this parenthesis of two or three days, or perhaps even more: still dead, there at Miragno, as Mattia Pascal; and now dead, on the other hand, in Rome, as Adriano Meis.
Not knowing what to do, hoping to find some distraction from all my worries, I took these two dead men out for a walk in Pisa.

A sudden joy, or, rather, madness seized me, uplifted me. Yes! Of course! I needn't kill myself, a dead man; I should kill that mad, absurd fiction who had racked and tortured me for two years, that Adriano Meis, condemned to being a coward, a liar, a wretch.

Yes, if I revealed to her that I wasn't Adriano Meis, I became Mattia Pascal again: dead but still married!
How can a man say such things? This was the peak of a wife's persecution of her husband: freeing herself, by identifying him in the body of a poor drowned man, and yet, after his death, still weighing on him, burdening him like this.

And, at the same time, don't many of our decisions, the plans we lay, the expedients we think up during the night seem futile, collapse, and vanish in the light of day? As day is different from night, so perhaps we are one thing during the daytime, and another after dark: though poor enough material at any hour.

More than once, waking in the heart of the night (which, on these occasions, proves it has no heart), I have felt in the silence and darkness a strange wonder, a strange embarrassment at the memory of something I had done during the preceding day, in broad daylight, paying no attention to it.

We are born with a sad privilege: that of feeling ourselves alive. From this an illusion results: we mistake for external reality our inner feeling of life.
For Signor Anselmo this sense of life was like a little lantern that each of us carries, alight; it makes us see how lost we are on the face of the earth, and reveals good and evil to us. the fearsome darkness which wouldn't exist if our lantern weren't lighted.

When he suffers, man forms a private idea of good and evil: of the good that others should do to him, which he demands as a right, as if he were entitled to some compensation for his suffering; and the evil that he can do to others, as if his sufferings, at the same time, permitted him anything. And if the others are not good to him; he considers them guilty; whereas any evil he does to them, he easily excuses.