Sentimental Economy by Edoardo Nesi

Author:Edoardo Nesi [Nesi, Edoardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781635422146
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Money and Perroni

Then summer arrives, the real, hot summer, and in Prato the heat grows ferocious. After noon I can’t even think to write, and I don’t do much besides read and listen to music and watch movies and lie on my back in bed and stare at the ceiling.

Only about seven in the evening do I start to recover and I go out to water the scorched plants. Direct summer sunshine is good for the agave plants and certain palm trees, but it’s bad for almost all the others, and it’s always a big surprise to see how quick they are to recover, especially the weeds, if watered at considerable length.

I don’t really know why I want to stay at home while Carlotta and the kids are at the beach, and when she calls to ask me about it, I reassure her that everything’s fine, and I’ll join them in a few days. Sure, of course, I know it’s the end of July.

In the incessant rough seas of useless thoughts that surge and ebb in my mind, the only clear thought is the way that in the many past days of suspended animation, the economy increasingly appears to me as a living, all-too-human science, certainly the best-suited of all the disciplines to narrate the substance of our lives and the fervor of our dreams and the misery of our fears: a stupefying generator of stories and hopes, light-years away from the razor-sharp, icy chill of numbers that are usually the medium used to tell that tale.

Because the numbers on inflation, unemployment, the growth or decline of GDP, and tax evasion aren’t just numbers, empty percentages. They’re photographs, or perhaps paintings that depict both the country and us, the people who live in it.

The account statements from our bank accounts and our credit cards and our debit cards, the positive or negative balance sheets of our checking accounts, the certifications of our mortgages and loans, even our tax returns, strike me as so many chapters of a book or scenes from a film, given the way they manage to recount with a precision worthy of Raymond Carver our economic and financial situations, that is to say our lives.

They’re stories, if you know how to read them, and they explain who we are. They testify to where we come from, and they can even predict where we’re likely to wind up, because it’s easy to say that money doesn’t count, and there are plenty of other things that count in life, if you read the biographies and the correspondence of the great poets and novelists—Dylan Thomas and F. Scott Fitzgerald among those closest to us in time, but also that supreme squanderer of money, Baudelaire; and Balzac and Foscolo and Joyce; and William Blake and Daniel Defoe, who are buried side by side in London, in the cemetery of Bunhill Fields, “the Campo Santo of the Dissenters”: practically all the classics we venerate—you’ll notice that they almost never talk about winged

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