Elle’s Reviews > Confidenza > Status Update

I, to my misfortune, am not like him; his ability to push against evil is equal to his capacity to understand it. In me it’s mutated into an extreme political intransigence that won’t let anyone off the hook, and that distresses me, above all.

We need a model of empathy: that word, currently fashionable, and therefore, lackluster, is an elixir against the world’s ferocity, difficult though it may be to find it uncorrupted by fictions. The model is my father, empathic to the highest degree. Our lives, as his children, still amount to a desperate attempt to resemble him, or at least to not do anything[…]to cause him grief.

And wake up to the situation: your wife, with all likelihood, is ready to get into bed with anyone who thinks highly of you, in order to prove that they think even more highly of her, while you’re at mirrors, are ready to go to bed with her in order to feel less humiliated by the greatness they unreasonably attribute to you.

And even if he does, while you’re reading this letter, do you really want to get into it with him? He’d be guilty of the same thing you’ve committed one hundred times, with women who are married, or otherwise taken, even when we were together, and you were supposed to be faithful to me. So shut up and relax.

But I didn’t lift a finger. What do you want to do — Teresa wrote, making fun of me – confront the petty pedagogue, slap him, challenge him to a duel, wait for him in a dark corner so you can slit his throat? Think about it. Is Itrò putting the moves on your wife, groping her against her will? No. It’s the other way around.