Another article by Massimo Fini that I found very interesting, and chilling the first time I read it. I obviously disagree with him, but I think his view is extremely coherent when considered from his own perspective. I believe his words are worth reading because they offer a rather unusual view of atheism, one that doesn’t try to sugar coat the nihilism and meaninglessness that atheism, in my opinion, unavoidably and logically (if one is coherent, and not all people are coherent: and maybe it’s a good thing) leads to. And in fact, when I was an atheist, my view was the same as his.
The following is the translation of Massimo Fini’s article, “Noi vecchi, senza illusioni né sogni”
The bolded emphasis is mine, just like in the previous article
“I was walking through the streets of Petersburg and felt lonely, and that was strange, because for twenty-seven years I had lived alone in Petersburg.”
(White Nights, Dostoevsky)
I walk through the streets of Milan and watch the boys hurrying off. With a bit of effort, I could keep up with them, but no one could give me back their ease, or the radiance of the skin that I too once had as a boy. I walk on and see old women, bent, shrunken, shriveled, grey-haired, leaning on walking sticks, and yet, I tell myself, they too were once girls, perhaps even beautiful girls, and it seems impossible to me. I walk on and see women who are old, though a little less old, and realize with horror that they are the girls of my own generation, the ones we courted and sometimes loved. The young never think that the old were once young too.
I had placed my mother in one of those facilities now called nursing homes, decent enough places, after all. We had never talked much, but one afternoon she said to me almost point-blank: “The only thing that ever worked between your father and me was sex,” and an electric shock ran down my spine. I could not imagine my mother and father in an embrace, and yet my sister and I were born from precisely that. As an aside: because she had emphysema, the doctors wanted to stop her from smoking. I said “ this woman has nothing left in life, do you want to deprive her even of the one pleasure she still has?” And so I used to bring her cigarettes in secret: Nazionali Semplici, the blue pack.
In the sweltering summer of 2003, when old people were dying in droves, especially in the big cities, I was sitting near a table of young men playing cards at a beach bar. One of them, wearing a huge pair of shameless sunglasses, gangster-style, with the air of someone who thought himself untouchable, commented: “Excellent! There’ll be more parking spaces in Milan.” And the one facing him shot back: “I wouldn’t get your hopes up. Those people don’t drive anymore anyway.” They were just swaggering remarks, of course, and inwardly I smirked. Young people, at times, are fond of us too, in their own way. The fact was that those two rascals could afford to joke, while the entire over-sixty beach crowd was gasping for breath and every morning, trembling, scanned the weather charts in the newspapers to see how many more degrees the temperature had risen. And in the eyes of the oldest among them one could read, even if concealed, the fear of feeling ill at any moment.
At one point in my life I lived, with my friend Giagi, in a squalid apartment block in Piazza Amati, on the far western outskirts of Milan, at the edge of an immense terrain vague where here and there one could still see little “war gardens,” remnants of a half-rural, half-urban reality that the city was in the process of devouring.
That apartment block was so dismal that, across eight floors, only three families lived there. One was Giagi and me; another was two girls who claimed to be models but in fact were kept women; and in the third, the most ordinary of the lot, lived a certain Visinalis, a man in his fifties already defeated by life, married to a hideously ugly English wife and father to two small children. Since my parents were out of the picture, my place became a gathering spot for every layabout around. Hardly an evening went by without our making merry. Not that anything especially sinful usually happened. The girls kept their distance; sexual permissiveness, which would arrive with the hippie generation, was still to come. They did not “concede themselves,” and with them it was an endless, exhausting business, especially in third-run cinemas, fumbling above and below blouse and skirt, “all fuss and no result,” as Jannacci put it.
We played the guitar, blasted records at full volume, and made noise until three or four in the morning. One evening Visinalis, beside himself, rang the doorbell. I went to answer. He was understandably upset: with all that racket, we regularly woke his children. Since he raised his voice a little, I told him, “Be more civil.” The poor man, thinking it an insult, got even angrier and shouted, “YOU be more civil!” So I grabbed him by the collar and sent him tumbling down the stairs. A stupid, easy, cowardly stunt, done to impress my friends at the expense of a man who could not compete with my twenty years, a thing I am still ashamed of today. Or perhaps above all today, now that I know that if I picked a fight with young men, I would end up like Visinalis.
In old age everything declines except those horrible hairs that sprout from the nose and ears.
And yet the most dramatic aspect of old age is not physical decay, but the impossibility of any life project, existential, sentimental, professional. Time is lacking. The future is lacking. Hope is lacking. Sister Death has already raised her scythe. It is true that one may die at any age, even at twenty, and that death is certain. But it is one thing to imagine it in some indefinite future, another when it walks beside you. It is one thing when it is a distant certainty, another when you know you are in the final stretch of the game. And that there will be no extra time.
One afternoon I asked my dear friend Giorgio Bocca, the only true friend I had in this profession, together with Walter Tobagi, who believed he had a brilliant future ahead of him as editor of the Corriere della Sera and would surely have reached that goal - had it not taken just two idiots to cut him down, proof that life is Chance- whether he was afraid of death. “Yes,” was his honest answer. And it could hardly be otherwise. It is not a physical fear, since when the moment comes all of us are capable of facing it, but a metaphysical one. It is the horror of Nothingness. The terrifying Nothing. Nonexistence. Everything you have lived, loved, known, seen, heard, read, thought, all of it suddenly erased, plunged into a darkness without time and without awakening.
Man tries to fill the meaninglessness of existence with every sort of activity. Deep down we know it perfectly well, we all know it, always have, that nothing has meaning, that life is a game. But in order to endure it, we need to fill it. With actions, thoughts, myths, hopes, passions, beliefs, illusions, dreams. And old age is without illusions and without dreams. Because there is nothing left to dream of. Nothing left to await. Nothing except death.
If an old man can no longer dream, he can at least remember. Once, when I had gone to visit a great stage actress, Paola Borboni, who was living out her final years in a home, I had the imprudence, in trying to comfort her, to say: “Still, you must have so many beautiful memories…” She let out a cry that was almost a roar (she was, after all, a great actress) and, lifting herself halfway from her bed, hissed: “Memories? Beautiful memories are the most tormenting thing for an old person.” Because, by contrast, they intensify the pain of the present.
The world you knew and sometimes, with the energy and recklessness of youth, even mastered, has vanished too. The landscape has changed, the places as well; objects are different, and so are the myths, the idols, the actors, the books people look to. The world of the old lies neither in the future nor in the past: it lies in the present. In the memory of dead friends. Everything is muted, remote, far away. Evening has fallen. You are a survivor.”
