synusi@: identity in search of words, but no: “because once the evil of reading has taken over the body, weakens it so that it becomes easy prey to the scourge of the other, which nestles in the inkwell and rotting in the pen” /// virginia wolf
Sebastiano Mauri: “Words are important”, shouted Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa, annoyed by his interviewer. As much as experience is the essence of life, words are the essence of thought, are the thought itself. Approximate or uncompromising words create approximate or uncompromising thoughts. Words are the dowry offered by reading, an endless offer to escape, an airplane ticket to an unknown destination. Reading can bring us into unknown worlds or even too familiar places, but thanks to reading imprisonment doesn’t exist. Writing is a form of elaboration of reading. His illegitimate son. It’s difficult to imagine writing without reading, luxuriant plants in an arid ground. It’s by recognizing my own life in other people’s narrations that I have imagined and written the novel Enjoy the Problem, coming out soon. Writing as a form of rereading, but also a way to relive, by interpreting it, one’s own life, own identity. But if identity was a young man asking for my advice, I’d tell him to be intuitive, to use his sense of touch, smell and taste to find himself, and to forget about words, because they tend to simplify the most complex and elusive entity we know: ourselves.
sy@: cities, like people, change vibration tuning with the rhythms of the days. unknown cities to play. you feel more in tune living them day or night?
SM: I am very attracted by opposites. Day and night are both great companions. Night can mean peace: a silent apartment, the telephone not ringing, nobody requiring our attention. The creative night, friend of the writer, the painter, the sculptor, the photographer. But it also means adventure: bars, music, drinks, new encounters. At night you can relate to people you wouldn’t approach by day. The night knocks down barriers, expands horizons. I have made marvelously impossible encounters by night. The morning instead makes you feel in harmony with nature. There’s a good air in the morning. It’s full of energy, like an adolescent. It’s synonymous of productivity. Hands flow rapidly on the keyboard, carrot juices are drunk. I like the morning.
sy@: who (or what) is the worst enemy of a friend?
SM: The worst enemy of the traveler is attachment to habits. Travelling to recognize fragments of home, to find familiar faces, to recreate one’s own coordinates. When travelling we must enjoy the lack of coordinates, being fishes out of the water. We have to leave at home the recipe of grandma’s stew. Other people’s grandmothers are full of surprises, we just have to give them a chance to serve us a portion of their own stew (of groundhog). The best friend of the traveler is curiosity. It allows you not to ever get bored, not to be short of programs or arguments. A curious traveler knows that everybody has a story to tell or something to teach. It doesn’t need to bring along the latest episodes of Lost on his Ipad. Curiosity never feels alone. It has the courage to throw away the map and get actually lost. To close his eyes and feel the wind on his skin. It has another smell this wind, if only you pay attention to it.