A Place in Which to Say “I” in Truth

I would like to tell you some of the more fascinating and convincing aspects of the journey I have made in the course of my life.
First, let me recall the instant of my life in which, for the first time, I understood what the existence of God is. I was in the seminary, halfway through high school, and we were having a singing lesson; for the first quarter of an hour, our teacher normally explained the history of music, playing some records for us to hear. Even though that day was a day of silence, he put on a disc of 78 rpm and, all of a sudden, we heard the voice of a tenor who was then very famous, Tito Schipa; with a powerful vibrant voice, he began to sing an aria from act 4 of Donizetti’s La Favorita: “Gentle spirit of my dreams, you gleamed one day but I lost you. Flee hope from the heart, glimmers of love, flee along with it.” From the first note it sent a shiver through me.
What that shiver meant I was to understand gradually with the years that passed; for only time makes you understand what the seed is, as the song of that title says, and what is inside it. You can understand what the seed is if you have seen the development; but the first time you see the seed, you cannot understand what is contains. So was the first instant of trembling for me, in which I had the perception of that ultimate longing that defines the human heart when it is not distracted by vanities that flare up and die in a few moments.
It is a longing of the heart that lasts while you are dancing and then, when you go home, and then, as I learned from another experience I had much later. During the first years of my teaching at the University, I accepted an invitation of a group to an end-of-year dinner. After the meal, they began to dance; I stayed in my place, watching. After a while, I got to my feet and said, “Stop!” They stopped, rather shocked, and I told them, “There is a difference between you and me: In this beautiful game, in this enjoyable movement, in this affectionate relationship, you have an ultimate, terrible, distraction and you don’t notice a seed that is in this game of yours, a seed of sadness. When you have finished, you will go home, and you will say, ‘Bye, see you tomorrow,’ you will go up to your room and go to bed; now, this seed–in those of you who still have a minimum of human sensitivity–this seed of sadness will weigh you down, provoke you, as if you were lying down with a stone strapped to your back. This seed–which you are not aware of–which is at the origin of your enjoyment of the dance and of the sadness that will come, as soon as it is noted and burned away by sleep, when you go to bed–is a seed of melancholy; the melancholy characteristic of something that is not complete, of something lacking.”
In that class, in the singing of Tito Schipa, I had really perceived the shiver of something that was lacking; something that was lacking not in Donizetti’s beautiful song, but in my life: something that was lacking and would never have found satisfaction, support, completeness, or answer, anywhere.

Vanishing point
This was barely hidden and kept within me, in the unconscious shiver that I felt. But when, the following year, my excellent teacher of philosophy read Leopardi to us, a passage of unexpected confirmation appeared which, as well as confirming, increased the impression that Donizetti’s La Favorita had given me. I remember reading the poem To Aspasia, where the poet–addressing one of the many women he was in love with–says (here I paraphrase), “It is not your face I desire, it is something inside your face. It is not your body I desire, but something of which your body is a sign, that lies behind you, and I don’t know how to reach it.” It is as if–and here the idea was clear–what we grasp with am eager hand we cannot embrace, because the boundary of which we grasp escapes us. There is, I would say now, a vanishing point, there is something that lies beyond the object we grasp, therefore we never catch it sufficiently and there is an intolerable injustice, which we try to conceal from ourselves, by distraction. Throwing oneself into the instant is the most morose way of closing oneself to this opening that all things call out, that all things drive toward.