“You are lucky being locked down there!”, surprisingly the common opinion of most friends and relatives, or better, exactly those who never understood my choice to come and live in a remote and wild place. …
Travel has been my catharsis. I am not referring to reaching an exotic destination under the illusion of not being a tourist in a commercial trap -and loving it. I mean those years spent on same-day return flights, speeding taxis, and overpriced hotels, keeping the heaviest footprint to say a few words about another product -and hating it.
My days were a rollercoaster of stress and forced fun, deterioration of my mental and physical qualities, a complete detachment from the environmental and emotional aspects of reality. For a decade, I simply grew more and more addicted to digital. …
In these days of climate change protests, Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle came to my mind:
“I am thinking of a general strike of all writers until finally coming to its senses. Would you support it?”
“Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out.”
“Or the college professors.”
“Or the college professors,” I agreed. I shook my head. “No, I don’t think I would support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”
“I just can’t help thinking what a real shaking up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new…
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