“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. Last year, they were asking me -some worried, some derisive: “What are you doing all day long?”. As if real life is delays, desks, aperitifs and weekends. Today, guzzling spring water after plowing, playing with the little one in the woods every day, walking one kilometer in the sun for garbage is good luck. We are not so different: we probably live the epic of our own life instead of reality. But I don’t forget we are both privileged, and both hypocrites. …
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. I spent the majority of my waking hours making others rich. I often worked on shallow products, compromising for the sake of business. …
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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