Oggi 16 ottobre, io compio cinquantotto anni. È una cosa spaventosa. Anche voi un giorno la proverete.

Today is not the 16th—it's not even October in my case—and it's not fifty-eight, but it is Oggi indeed that this terrifying thing happens to me. I'm one year older and reaching a number that bears some symbolic weight of some sort. It'll happen to you too, this is what is written. And it's not written by just anybody. It is written by this most perceptive observer of the human mind, Dino Buzzati. This comes from his «Storielle della sera», which starts with someone greeting someone else with "Good day!" The other one replies "Good evening." It doesn't translate well in English.

«Buongiorno» gli dissi. Lui mi guardo e rispose «Buonasera».

One line. The full tragedy of life. Time passing... we don't even have time to greet each others, it's already too late.

And after time passing, people passing.

And between you passing and time passing, other people passing by.

What a sad, pathetic little show. What a circus. With the bulk of the company as lurkers—not even spectators—cramming in the estrades, and the rest making the clowns on stage.

And people passing in front of you, behind, looking for their seats, excusing themselves, bothering everything and everybody, even in the distance, always moving from nowhere to elsewhere, to do nothing... Don't you feel this imperious necessity to grab your neighbour by the sleeve and tell them "let's get out of there! let's go!"

It cannot be that in a theatre of billions there is not a single one who would understand what his neighbour means — and would agree to the escape. There are probably hundreds of thousands of similarly minded people, but they are scattered all over the place. And I could find some of them all right, but it's not even the place that is the problem, it's the time. Buzzati was one of them. But he was far in time, in my time... He was already five years dead when I was born.

Sometimes you find someone; the timing is not good either but almost—at least you're both still alive—and you find them in the real world, with a strike of luck, like winning the lottery, you find someone say in some corner of a big distant city, you find yourself by their side with the fabric of their clothes waiting to be plucked and pulled, the invitation extended... But then you pull too strongly and they recoil in fright as you hang onto their garment. Back to loneliness. Back to the company of dead authors.

So Oggi a new number gets to define me, for the next year or, as chance may have it, forever, «un po’ più greve dei precedenti per via del numero». In Buzzati's story, the significance comes from the fact that his father died at this age. That is, at fifty eight. In my case, it's my mother, who passed away at the untimely age of forty-nine. That's how old I am today. «E il confronto è inevitabile.» And the same incredulity strikes, even if «l’idea che un giorno io avrei potuto raggiungere la sua medesima età era del tutto inverosimile.»

I wouldn't mind if, for whatever reason, I don't make it to the next number. I don't want to know what a half-century weighs like. And I can't stand the solitude. I've told myself everything. I'm overspilling from what those who can't speak anymore have written, to which there is no reply. I feel it's time for this loneliness to be filling the emptiness that is between the stars, which are far and don't speak either, but at least they're resplendent. I'm tired of being in a crowd of empty souls, bored, tired more than tortured people. I'm sick of this union of cowardice and banality. I feel I'd be more at ease in the infinity of vacuum than in the one of densely packed nothing.

But it's not easy to jump into the night. In an existence that is defined by gravity, one has to fall into it. And this is not easy either. There is the literal sudden drop from a big height, but I don't think I could. I'm a coward too, when it comes to the big jump. I would be overwhelmed by too much fright followed by too much pain. There is also the natural endless fall from a long time. That's how most of us do it, we let it happen, we wait. We age.

We're so boring even in the way we die. And what a decadence. What a shameful, despicable, humiliating reverence where time bends you as if to invite you to retire gracefully, to prostrate yourself before you leave with grace, but we stay there crippled and torn, our bowing down turned a broken back, looking at the world from below again, from down, but never to raise to it again, just fossilising, becoming the background, blocking the way of those who don't realize that the time it'll take them to go around you, is part of the time that will immobilize them a little down farther.

Buzzati warned us, he warned me when I was sixteen, reading his stories of young people chasing old ones to kick them out of rage at growing old... but getting old themselves as they spent time doing that: battering their future. Beating yourself from the past. We don't see it, we don't feel it happening by the second, but we get old before we know it. We were born with youth. That is so natural, that is so familiar that we think that it's what defines us, that "old" is the others, the rest, the before. While in reality, it's already us.

We see it as a great progress that life expectancy is so high now. There is this myth that we stay younger longer. It's not true. You can keep a fruit edible in the fridge. It'll never be fresh once it's been plucked from the tree. And if it's not plucked, it just fall by itself on the ground, where only rodents take notice. It was a flower yesterday, it's a fruit as you tear it apart from its branch—mature, pulpous, fragrant—it's already rotting minutes after it performed its decorative function in a plate along with others, to bring some colour, shape and smoothness to a nature morte. One really has to entertain no artistic taste at all—to be completely devoid of sensibility—to seriously think that there is still naked beauty in anything that is not at the peak of its trajectory, an ascent and descent with a stationary point suspended in perfection, between two free falls, one upward towards the aspiration, the other downward towards the doom.

The moment of suspension, this fragment of a lifetime when you are floating in purity, when you are beautiful, when you are young, when you don't question anything because you are the answer to everything, the nec plus ultra, when you have all the innocence and perfection of the child which you're not anymore, and all the might and power of the adult which you're about to become. This moment that is the merging of all that would and all that could. This moment. This moment doesn't even exist because it is an expectation, a dream, a frustration before, and it's already a memory, a remorse, and an illusion after. We run from not yet to too late.

Still, this moment...

To know that's it all around, constantly, flowing all around us, and that we've been sloshed past it, and now that we are carried away from it after having been hurled towards it, we're only left with the vision of the crowd of others not seizing it either.

Sharing this universal burden, carrying a bit of its weight together, to tell the other: what do you feel about this moment? If you could capture the someone else's failure to stay there, to remain there, in this escape together you still embrace something bigger than the moment itself. You get the whole bubble of two selves holding hands around it. You turn a point into a volume. But go ask someone in the street—anyone—what they think about the colour of the sky or about the smell of rain or about the touch of the mist and get all their emptiness, all their contempt or all their conformism. And that would still be something. But you go and get their silence, mainly. Either way, you get all their confusion, systematically.

The only way you can connect with people is to make them laugh. This they can do. You tell them how dark is the day, how it stinks out there or how calloused even a baby's ass-skin is and they'll have a good, hearty laugh.

There is a solitude of the soul which seems to me unnecessary. And any way to distract this solitude with a company that falls in any other category—friendship, courtship, competition, laughters...—is just a painkiller that robs you from even noticing how deeply, utterly alone the soul can be. And to trap this empty soul, to shield it away from the sky, the weight of rotting meat. Grounded by fermenting matter. What a sight.

There is another story from Buzzati which I will never forget—Le gobbe nel giardino—and that I associate to the previous one, in fact I tend to mix them and always imagine the narrator in his garden bumping into a hump as he realizes he arrived to this age of being older than his father. In this story, when someone you knew—an acquaintance, a colleague—maybe even a loved one—a comrade, a family relation, a good friend—when this someone dies, a hump appears in your garden. The size differs. The accident in the garden is proportional to the inflection or deflection that this person brought into your life. And as you walk in this garden, finding more or less important protuberances that hinder or slow down your stroll, you remember these people... and naturally the realisation slowly creeps into your mind. Are we even in someone's garden?

Può darsi che, per colpa del mio dannato carattere, io muoia solo come un cane in fondo a un vecchio e deserto corridoio. Eppure una persona quella sera inciamperà nella gobbetta cresciuta nel giardino e inciamperà anche la notte successiva e ogni volta penserà, perdonate la mia speranza, con un filo di rimpianto penserà a un certo tipo che si chiamava Dino Buzzati.