(Rivista Internazionale - December 1994: We are as old as our hopes - 4/6)

I don't know what or who freed me. The ropes have snapped, Isa, and I'm drifting away.
What force is pulling me? A blind force? A love? Perhaps a love ...» (9).
The nostalgia for a love - or for a Love? - in which to recommence and rebuild his life, envelops his soul. It should be - this love - a force, o better someone in whom we could all find ourselves again, and who would guarantee our victory over the monsters tearing us apart.
«Someone who would bear witness for me, who would lighten this immense burden, who would take it from me ... »
For the old man, the meeting with Love coincides with his death.
«What is stifling me this evening, as I write these words, what is almost breaking my heart this love of which I finally know its name ador ... » (10).
Without love, the life of an old person is hell, even if gilded. As demonstrated by a book of memories, short stories and reflections entitled Anime e Voci by Luciano Radi (11). The most exemplary pages are in the epistolary Casa Serena. A man has been put into a rest home for the old outside the city, very beautiful and welcoming, provided with every comfort. The old man writes often to his son. Never a reply, never a telephone call, much less a visit.
«I don't understand! You're busy with your work and Enrica with her office job and household tasks, certainly has little time. But you could find just a moment for me, disconsolate and sad».
He only receives a letter of three lines, which he comments on thus: «If I were allowed to keep a cat here, a dog, I would have at least the warmth of something alive next to me. But the rules of the Home don't allow it.»
In another letter he notes: «It would have been better if I'd stayed out in the road, in my own environment. I would have found company in the stones which saw me born, in the splashing of the fountain where I spent the happy days of my childhood and I'd have been able to go to the cemetery every day to talk to my dead ones. I would at least have been free to drag myself around the alleys with my miseries to cry out my need for love under the windows of my friends»:
Believe it or not, but many weddings are celebrated in the Casa Serena. «Certainly passions become cold at a late age; love is no longer like the one which explodes at 20, but the need for a union remains strong and prevailing. One can clearly see that man has not been created to live alone», at any age. The old man will find serenity in his meeting with the chaplain, older than him and alone, but a true friend, rich with human warmth and supported by the presence of He who is Love.
In his great novel Mr. Sammler's Planet, Saul Bellow presents a seventy-year old man, intellectual, widower, with impaired sight and alone. He is obsessed by memories of the war in which he took an active part. He is a survivor of extermination. While the post-war society adulates new idols - technology, progress, politics, sex, prosperity - old Mr. Sammler, disillusioned and tired, looks in other directions. He had read the historians of civilisation - Marx, Max Weber, Max Scheler, Toynbee, F. Oppenheimer and he had also been attracted by Adorno, Marcuse, Norman 0. Brown; he had read Mann's Doctor Faust, Malraux's Les Noyers d'Altembourg, Ortega, Valery's essays on history and politics. But after a few years he had lost any interest and enjoyment in these authors. At 70, only certain religious authors of the 14th century interest him and especially Meister Eckhart. The great mystic reminds him of a basic truth: «He who is poor in spirit is receptive of all spirit. Now God is the Spirit of spirits. The fruit of the spirit is love, joy and peace. See to it that you are stripped of all creatures, of all consolation from creatures. For certainly as long as creatures comfort and are able to comfort you, you will never find true comfort.

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(9) F. Mauriac, Groviglio di Vipere, Mondadori, Milan 1952, 114.
(10) ivi, 204-205.
(11) L. Radi, Anime e Voci, Rusconi, Milan 1990.


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