The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg

Author:Natalia Ginzburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2016-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

Silence

I heard Pelléas et Mélisande. I know nothing about music, but I found myself comparing words from old opera libretti (‘I will atone with my blood—the love which I placed in you’)—ponderous, gory, heavy words, with the fugitive, watery words (‘J’ai froid—ta chevelure’) of Pelléas et Mélisande.

I began to wonder if that (Pelléas et Mélisande) were not the beginning of our silence.

Because silence must be numbered among the strangest and gravest vices of our time. Those of us who have tried to write novels in our time know the discomfort and unhappiness that appears as soon as we reach the point when we have to make our characters talk to one another. For page after page our characters exchange comments that are insignificant but pregnant with a desolate unhappiness: ‘Are you cold?’ ‘No, I’m not cold.’ ‘Would you like some tea?’ ‘No thanks.’ ‘Are you tired?’ ‘I don’t know. Yes, perhaps I’m a bit tired.’ This is how our characters talk. They talk like this to kill time. They talk like this because they don’t know how to talk any more. Little by little the most important matters, the most terrible confessions, come out: ‘You killed him?’ ‘Yes, I killed him.’ The meagre barren words of our time are painfully wrung from silence and appear like the signals of castaways, beacons lit on the most distant hills, weak, desperate summonses that are swallowed up in space.

And so when we want to make our characters talk, we measure the profound silence that has, little by little, built up within us. We began to be silent as children, at table, in front of our parents who still spoke to us using the old, heavy, gory words. We remained silent. We remained silent as a protest and as a mark of contempt. We remained silent so that our parents would realize that their ponderous words were no longer any use to us. We had others that we kept in reserve. We would use these new words of ours later, with people who would understand them. Our silence was our wealth. Now we are ashamed of it and desperate and we know all the misery it brings. We shall never be free of it again. Those ponderous words that served our parents are a currency that has been withdrawn and which no one accepts. And we realize that the new words have no value, that we can buy nothing with them. They are no use for establishing relationships, they are watery, cold, sterile. They are no use for writing books, for linking us with someone we love, for saving a friend.

It is well known that a feeling of guilt is one of the vices of our time; a great deal is talked and written about it. We all suffer from it. We feel ourselves to be involved with something that gets filthier with every day that passes. And there is also the feeling of panic; we all suffer from that too. The feeling of panic comes from the feeling of guilt.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.