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thelonesomebodybuilder 's review for:
The Little Virtues
by Natalia Ginzburg
Ginzburg on England:
"“In London, which is a black and grey city, man has placed a few colours with precision and forethought. You can suddenly find a blue or red or pink front door among its black brothers. The buses that pass by in the grey air are painted a vivid red. These are colours that would be cheerful anywhere else, but here they are not cheerful; set in place in such an exact and deliberate way they are like the weak, sad smile of someone who doesn’t know how to smile.”
"“When we go into a shop the assistant greets us with the words ‘Can I help you?’ But these are mere words. She immediately shows that she is quite incapable of helping us and is not at all interested in trying to. There is no flicker in her of any desire to come to an agreement with us or cooperate with us, of any wish to satisfy us. When she looks for what we want she does not extend her gaze two centimetres beyond the end of her nose.
“English shop assistants are the stupidest shop assistants in the world.”
Ginzburg on growing up:
"And now we are really adult we think, and we are astonished that this is what being an adult is—not in truth everything we believed as a child, not in truth self-confidence, not in truth the calm ownership of everything on earth. We are adult because we have behind us the silent presence of the dead, whom we ask to judge our current actions and from whom we ask forgiveness for past offences: we should like to uproot from our past so many cruel words, so many cruel acts that we committed when, though we feared death, we did not know—we had not yet understood—how irreparable, how irremediable, death is: we are adult because of the silent answers, because of all the silent forgiveness of the dead which we carry within us. We are adult because of that brief moment when one day it fell to our lot to live when we had looked at the things of the world as if for the last time, when we had renounced our possession of them and returned them to the will of God: and suddenly the things of the world appeared to us in their just place beneath the sky, and the human beings too, and we who looked at them from the just place that is given to us: human beings, objects and memories—everything appeared to us in its just place beneath the sky. In that brief moment we found a point of equilibrium for our wavering life: and it seemed to us that we could always rediscover that secret moment and find there the words for our vocation, the words for our neighbour; that we could look at our neighbour with a gaze that would always be just and free, not the timid or contemptuous gaze of someone who whenever he is with his neighbour always asks himself if he is his master or his servant. All our life we have only known how to be masters and servants: but in that secret moment of ours, in our moment of perfect equilibrium, we have realized that there is no real authority or servitude on the earth. And so it is that now as we turn to that secret moment we look at others to see whether they have lived through an identical moment, or whether they are still far away from it; it is this that we have to know. It is the highest moment in the life of a human being, and it is necessary that we stand with others whose eyes are fixed on the highest moment of their destiny.”
"“In London, which is a black and grey city, man has placed a few colours with precision and forethought. You can suddenly find a blue or red or pink front door among its black brothers. The buses that pass by in the grey air are painted a vivid red. These are colours that would be cheerful anywhere else, but here they are not cheerful; set in place in such an exact and deliberate way they are like the weak, sad smile of someone who doesn’t know how to smile.”
"“When we go into a shop the assistant greets us with the words ‘Can I help you?’ But these are mere words. She immediately shows that she is quite incapable of helping us and is not at all interested in trying to. There is no flicker in her of any desire to come to an agreement with us or cooperate with us, of any wish to satisfy us. When she looks for what we want she does not extend her gaze two centimetres beyond the end of her nose.
“English shop assistants are the stupidest shop assistants in the world.”
Ginzburg on growing up:
"And now we are really adult we think, and we are astonished that this is what being an adult is—not in truth everything we believed as a child, not in truth self-confidence, not in truth the calm ownership of everything on earth. We are adult because we have behind us the silent presence of the dead, whom we ask to judge our current actions and from whom we ask forgiveness for past offences: we should like to uproot from our past so many cruel words, so many cruel acts that we committed when, though we feared death, we did not know—we had not yet understood—how irreparable, how irremediable, death is: we are adult because of the silent answers, because of all the silent forgiveness of the dead which we carry within us. We are adult because of that brief moment when one day it fell to our lot to live when we had looked at the things of the world as if for the last time, when we had renounced our possession of them and returned them to the will of God: and suddenly the things of the world appeared to us in their just place beneath the sky, and the human beings too, and we who looked at them from the just place that is given to us: human beings, objects and memories—everything appeared to us in its just place beneath the sky. In that brief moment we found a point of equilibrium for our wavering life: and it seemed to us that we could always rediscover that secret moment and find there the words for our vocation, the words for our neighbour; that we could look at our neighbour with a gaze that would always be just and free, not the timid or contemptuous gaze of someone who whenever he is with his neighbour always asks himself if he is his master or his servant. All our life we have only known how to be masters and servants: but in that secret moment of ours, in our moment of perfect equilibrium, we have realized that there is no real authority or servitude on the earth. And so it is that now as we turn to that secret moment we look at others to see whether they have lived through an identical moment, or whether they are still far away from it; it is this that we have to know. It is the highest moment in the life of a human being, and it is necessary that we stand with others whose eyes are fixed on the highest moment of their destiny.”