domenica 7 ottobre 2012

City, Baricco

People believe that the difficulties of a prodigy originate in the pressure placed on him by those around him, in the terrible expectations they have of him.
That's nonsense. The real problem is within, and others have nothing to do with it. The real problem is talent. Talent is like a cell gone mad, it grows uncontrollably and under no compulsion. It's as if someone had built a bowling alley in your house. It ruins you completely, yet it's also beautiful, and maybe in time you learn to bowl, brilliantly, and you become the greatest bowler in the world, but your house, how in the world can you put it right, how can you save it, how do you manage to hold on to something so that eventually, at the right moment, you can say This is my house, get out, you pigs, it's my house. You can't do it.
Talent is destructive, it's objectively destructive, and what happens around it doesn't count. It works from the inside, and destroys. You have to be very strong, to save something. And that is a boy. Can you imagine a bowling alley in the middle of a boy's house? Just the noise it makes, every blessed day, a constant uproar, and the certainty that silence, true silence-you can forget about it. Houses without silence. What sort of houses are they? Who can restore that boy's house to him?