Epilogue San Quirico d'Orcia, September 11, 1997. Dear Arianna, I keep putting it off, but that day will come soon. I'm playing cards face up, I don't know how much longer I can keep up the pretense. By the time you find this writing on your computer I will have already left: I leave it to you as a legacy, so to speak. I have no intention of taking it with me where I am going and I have no intention of telling you where I will go. The first stop will be the dog shelter, then I will leave for a long journey. I apologize in advance if my speech is rather confusing: I am gradually bringing the problem into focus. Love is bullshit, someone once told me, and I can't live without this bullshit. You'll tell me that this statement is contradictory, but everything in life is contradictory. The key to everything is the fear of death. Death scares us because we perceive our disappearance as the disappearance of life: once the individual who perceives it is finished, life ends. But this is false, life continues even after us: the problem lies in our perception, in feeling ourselves as individuals, separate from the Whole of which we are a part. Love solves this problem temporarily and illusorily, like drugs: it makes us lose the sense of our uniqueness-individuality-diversity, deluding us into thinking that a fusion has taken place between us and the loved object. The sign of this loss is the sense of laceration felt by those who are deprived of the loved one, completely analogous to a withdrawal crisis. Those who love do not fear death simply because, as an individual, they are already dead. Love makes us feel all the intoxication of this losing ourselves, it becomes a sweet anticipation of death. Those who love embrace death like a sister-lover; and it is in the moment of maximum annihilation, and also of maximum pleasure, that death is most intensely desired. Thus death itself appears sweet: it is an analogical reasoning, therefore incorrect, but suggestive. Plato says that love is a desire for immortality, but immortality presupposes the death of the body. Therefore love is a desire for death. Seen from this point of view, my dear, does not love seem to you a sublime idiocy? Worse: a deplorable form of weakness? We should find the strength to exist by remaining within ourselves, without drugs that allow us to forget the unbearable malaise of our separateness. I've never managed it. Christian love, in which you believe, would like to be the overcoming of selfishness in the offering of oneself to one's neighbor, and as such it claims to be more evolved and altruistic than that between two lovers. However, it betrays the same need and the same psychological matrix: the desire to annihilate loneliness; and it also proposes the same solution, the annihilation of oneself: call it oblation, sacrifice, self-immolation, martyrdom, in essence it is a self-harming and self-destructive voluptuousness, as is evident in all degenerate forms of mysticism. By sacrificing oneself for others, one does not eliminate the loneliness of others, one only eliminates one's own loneliness: this solution is also perfectly illusory and individualistic. I wonder if it is not the highest form of selfishness. As you see, I no longer believe in anything, and without a belief, man is no more alive than a wreck adrift in the tide. Your life, like that of almost everyone else, seems absolutely insignificant to me. What you mean by life, from my point of view, is nothing but a dull and senseless wait for death: you try to make it as pleasant as possible, you eat, you drink, you evacuate, you watch television, you sleep, you copulate, you joyfully welcome the fruits of your copulation, you keep each other company while waiting for the supreme moment, you escape into dreams, and you call all this love. But the meaning of all this, my dear, the meaning, do you ever wonder what it is? If the meaning of life is life itself, then the game might as well end. The existence of most people, from the cradle to the grave, is conceived and planned as a grandiose and unconscious waste of time. All of society conspires in this direction, starting with school. You are all guilty. I should say we are, but I am leaving the game. You will never have the courage, just as Antonia did not have it. Unlike you, she could have: she had wings, powerful but fragile wings, that could take her to immerse herself in the sun an instant before plunging into free fall; you are all wrapped up in matter as in a comfortable cocoon and you never feel the need to tear the silken envelope, you little short-sighted nurse too busy complying with the hospital regulations to feel the discomfort of being, of being there, of being its prisoners. What do you know about me? Reading my diary you would discover things you can't even imagine and that you couldn't understand. I have been a man, I have been a woman, I have been a horse, I have been wind, I have been pure pleasure, pure pain, pure joy, pure matter, pure spirit. You would like to make me an honest bourgeois. I do not absolve anyone. No, I do not absolve you. The stakes are too high: I am not yet twenty and the future is already all behind me. I have always wondered what the meaning of beauty is, and the answer was so obvious that I could not find it in the abstract theories in which I looked for it; I had already intuited it at sixteen, only to then distance myself more and more from it. It is very simple: without beauty one cannot live. I want to live literally dissolved in beauty: the synthesis of my life is all in that afternoon spent in a forest of holm oaks and chestnut trees in some place that I have forgotten; I have never lived a truer moment than that my getting lost, hoping to travel forever in nothingness and never arrive anywhere. I will not grow old at your side, busy with some work, raising your children, and somehow occupying your bed: you are asking me to spend nine thousand years underground, and such a sacrifice is possible, perhaps, only if fully deserved. Do you think you deserved it? I will not wait for the wrinkles to invade my face to realize too late that I have wasted my only chance to live. I must return to my place of origin. I hear you calling me from downstairs: you're telling me the hot chocolate is ready. I love your chocolate, I love everything about you, it'll be terrible to leave you, but you're playing a dirty game love: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. I wish I could love you, but miracles only happen once in a lifetime, when they happen, and I've already wasted mine. I have not lied to you, I have never given you my soul: perhaps I am giving it to you now, for the first and last time. After all, you have never told me the truth. I feel you getting closer, the handle turns. I don't know how to tell you that this is goodbye. I don't know how to tell you that I'm leaving. I don't know how to tell you that