[b]Elena Ferrante
When the task we give ourselves has the urgency of passion, there’s nothing that can keep us from completing it.[/b]
Does anyone here actually believe this?
When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.
Not much love here of course.
I am what I am and I have to accept myself; I was born like this, in this city, with this dialect, without money; I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured.
Of course after a while it all gets a little repetitive.
Everything is interesting if you know how to work on it.
Even if this were true would you want it to be?
I had never seen her naked, I was embarrassed. Today I can say that it was the embarrassment of gazing with pleasure at her body, of being the not impartial witness of her sixteen-year-old’s beauty a few hours before Stefano touched her, penetrated her, disfigured her, perhaps, by making her pregnant. At the time it was just a tumultuous sensation of necessary awkwardness, a state in which you cannot avert the gaze or take away the hand without recognizing your own turmoil, without, by that retreat, declaring it, hence without coming into conflict with the undisturbed innocence of the one who is the cause of the turmoil, without expressing by that rejection the violent emotion that overwhelms you, so that it forces you to stay, to rest your gaze on the childish shoulders, on the breasts and stiffly cold nipples, on the narrow hips and the tense buttocks, on the black sex, on the long legs, on the tender knees, on the curved ankles, on the elegant feet; and to act as if it’s nothing, when instead everything is there, present, in the poor dim room, amid the worn furniture, on the uneven, water-stained floor, and your heart is agitated, your veins inflamed.
Rendered beautifully in the film?
She went like that saint who, although she still has her head on her shoulders, is carrying it in her hands, as if it had already been cut off.
Even publically decapitated.