Translator: Eloisa Zendali Reviewer: Elena Montrasio
We are the stories we remember.
So, we must start with a story.
The stories that pass through time and space
are the stories that define us.
This story begins at sea.
It is a rough sea, and there is a boat fighting against it.
The sailors row with difficulty, they know that the sea means death
because, in the Odyssey, the sea is death.
It's crossing the unknown, the definition of the world
and of oneself.
Tied to the mast of this ship is the hero we all know,
Ulysses.
At one point, all of a sudden,
this rough sea becomes flat, calm.
And fear captures any sailor who knows that, if there is not even a bit of wind,
reaching a port becomes difficult.
And in this almost mystical silence a whisper is heard:
voices of women - incredibly sweet.
They are the voices of women who have a very strange body.
Their body is not what we imagined
with the help of cartoons.
It is a bird’s body, but their voice is very sweet.
They promise to tell the sailors of that boat
what is happening on Earth.
And in particular
what happened during the Trojan war.
Now - you all know that I am talking about the sirens of Ulysses -
what kind of temptation is this?
One who is returning -
at least he is trying, he’s been trying for 20 years -
to return from the Trojan war;
And you, as a promise, as a temptation, tell him:
"I will tell you what you have already experienced".
Clearly it is a very strange temptation.
Why does this hero of ours, who has tied himself to the mast of the ship,
wants to hear exactly this song
about the story from which he is returning?
To know if that story has entered history.
In the Greek world,
entering the history of epic means finally having an identity.
Every culture is structured around this great challenge:
how can we keep our name from falling into nothingness?
Birth is an occurrence that we have not chosen,
and our greatest fear is that
we will return to the void from which we came.
Ulysses wants to know if his name has finally entered History;
and this is worth a temptation like that of the sirens.
But when the ship passes by the island of the sirens,
around the rocks only bones of men can be seen.
All of us here have this same problem.
In the morning we get up
and look for a reason, a performance
through which we can finally be someone.
And this generates in us that fear of living -
that "fatigue of living", as a philosopher calls it.
Why? Because we have transformed our self into a performance.
Our lives resemble onions:
we have many layers with which we try to define our identity,
but we don’t know where the deep core has ended up.
"I come from this city, I have this job",
and we try to build on the periphery of our ego
an identity,
so that our being does not fall into nothingness.
Because, I repeat, we have only one problem:
how can we keep things from falling into nothingness?
And this scares us.
This tires us.
And every culture finds its solution.
When I meet the parents of my students -
the rare times when they both come to the meetings,
because it seems that nowadays education is entrusted only to mothers:
Dear dads, come and talk to us teachers,
your children will be proud
of the fact that you have taken an hour of leave for them -
I say to them: "Ah, now I understand".
“What it is that you understand?" "The reason why your child is like that".
(Laughter)
Because your children do not resemble
each of you individually.
They resemble the relationship between the two of you.
Because the only way for a man to be born and to be born again
is to be generated.
And only when there is a relationship,
there is a principle that gives birth to that nucleus of being
that allows us that permanence in existence,
that does not depend on things that continually escape us.
And finally we can breathe a sigh of relief.
This is why roll calls in the morning are important.
I believe that the greatest revolution
in contemporary school, especially in the Italian one,
depends on how we call the roll.
Concerning animals, nature provides
for the fact that they pull out armor, claws, fangs
to be able to survive in the environment
in which the pup immediately has to make do.
And why instead man cub
takes so much time to make do?
Because the man cub is counter-evolutionary.
He maintains his frailty,
because frailty forces other men to care.
This is what differentiates us from animals.
Our claws, our armor, our fangs
are here and here.
A relationship means giving the other what the other needs.
When you drink a glass of water
you quench your thirst,
you have come into contact with a relationship:
the simplest thing: H20.
Two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen
is a relationship; each gives the other what the other needs.
And it’s only a relationship that generates and regenerates a person.
In an era in which we delude ourselves that we can gain time,
and struggle to gain time -
an absurd expression, as if we were not part of time.
We don’t have time at our disposal, time has us at its disposal.
The only way to gain time
is to grow,
and the only way to grow is to always be reborn as a new being.
So I had fun redefining the ages of life,
in “The art of being frail",
starting from this very element.
It is now quite a widespread idea
that the stages of life are disposed on a straight line:
there is a beginning and then, following an almost inertial principle,
we will eventually get to the credits.
So we find ourselves struggling
to conquer that permanence,
to know if we have entered History with the capital H.
And if there was another solution?
If we could really be happy without having to prove it to anyone?
Coulnd’t it be that a living being
lives in the measure in which it is generated and regenerated?
So, generating these children of yours
doesn’t happen once and for all.
It happens every day during which someone decides
to put that person back into the world.
Only in this way do we gain time
and let others gain time,
because we don’t stop growing and making them grow.
Life does not resemble a straight line, it resembles a spiral;
whenever we are close to the center
that generates this nucleus of novelty that each of us is -
because to be born is to be unpublished to the world,
none of us here has the same fingerprints,
none of us has the same iris,
in such a way that now
our technological objects recognize us so.
And we love Siri, we love Cortana;
We look at that screen on average
200 times a day.
Imagine yourself staring at your son, your daughter,
200 times a day.
Just like that, all of a sudden, 200 times.
They will ask you,"Are you nuts?"
(Laughter)
No!
It's because you're important,
and there's never been anything like you on Earth.
It is exactly what we seek from those objects:
the fact that they know that we are unique.
But isn’t there another way to know it?
Yes, but it’s a tiring one.
Life is a spiral:
the closer we are to this center as it moves forward,
the more our life lives and expands;
the more we move away, the more our life disintegrates.
And what is
the way in which the stages of life are realized?
I had fun, through the words of a poet,
in redefining them,
because they have nothing to do with a straight line.
What is it with adolescence that we must keep for a lifetime?
What is it about maturity that we must maintain throughout our life?
So I redefined life this way:
adolescence as an art of hope;
maturity as an art of dying;
the third age, or reparation, as the art of being frail;
and the last as dying or as the art of being born again.
What happens during adolescence? Why it is called the art of hope?
Because for the first time the unpublished script
that each of these youngsters came here to tell, emerges.
And there is no longer the easy solution dictated by pleasure or obligation
that is typical of a child -
everything they want, they cry and they get it.
The unpublished finally comes to light
and it is the reason why a boy, a girl,
feels for the first time that freedom is in his or her hands.
He or she is ready to break any walls,
as long as that novelty is realized.
And this is what makes young people the main characters of their own lives.
Protagonist is a beautiful, ancient word,
which indicates the one who fights in the front row,
the one who fights first.
But nobody fights without a reason to fight.
And adolescence is the moment when that ardour
that we can call rapture, vocation, as you wish to define it,
finally comes into our existence.
Through the relationship with the world we understand our purpose.
I remember when my literature teacher
called me and told me:
"Alessandro, this is my favourite book of poetry,
you can borrow it.
Bring it back in two weeks".
That day I became a teacher,
because that teacher told me his secret.
He saw in me something I myself couldn't see the mirror.
This is what that roll call is.
It is the fact that, in my eyes, when I call that name,
they must see that I am already lovingly aware
of the story that will come to life.
I do not know it,
but I know that the core of my belief -
and "professor" comes from to profess -
are the first and last names of those students.
That is why they are more important than the lesson itself.
And then the second phase begins:
full of this ardour, of this vocational impulse,
we think that the world is waiting for us.
Then maturity is the art of dying, because, one after the other,
all the things we think we have to bring into the world will be dismantled
and nobody will be waiting for us.
But since we have freed ourselves from the pleasure principle of the child,
we know and learn that that fire feeds
on the obstacles it encounters.
Imagine Michelangelo in front of a block of marble
daring to say:
"This Carrara marble is such a pain. It is so tough".
(Laughter)
And yet, it is precisely that hardness, that resistance,
that gives us masterpieces such as those by Michelangelo.
We must understand that this frees a teenager
from the claim, the narcissistic delirium,
typical of those who remain children forever -
that there is nothing to explore in the world,
and that the world only serves as an affirmation of the self.
Only those who have found in the world a reason to die will explore it for real.
So maturity is the art of dying
without losing the ardour of adolescence.
And so we enter the third age,
the repair or art of being frail,
that depends on one thing only: the quality of the relationships
we have with the world and with others.
To say, "I love you" to somebody has now become too simple.
Sometimes, instead of ,"I love you", see if you can write,
"I don't want you to die,
and I will work hard so that this will not happen".
Let me say it again: "I don't want you to die,
and I will do all I can so that this won't happen".
To love a person is to be the keepers of their destiny,
like that teacher who gave me the book that day,
because that morning he wasn’t thinking
of yet another boring school day to face
and of annoying pupils to put up with.
From his library
he took the book that could be save his student.
because a relationship thrives
when you give the other what the other needs.
You take care of the world
only when you have something to bring into the world.
If today I am a happy teacher at the age of 40,
is because when I was 17 a man lent me his favorite book of poetry.
It's like I'm explaining water, the simplest of things,
but water is a relationship: H2O.
Giving the other what the other needs.
So we can allow ourselves to enter
the final phase of our life
which isn’t, after all, the final one:
dying, or the art of being born again,
means exactly that, when a person discovers
what is the unpublished book they came to write on this earth,
the struggle they fight every day to accomplish the task,
in others before than in themselves,
is what confirms to them they did something beautiful in the world.
That other people may or may not know about it, it doesn't matter.
So, each time I call the roll,
what I should do is get down on my knees
in front of those 20, 25 faces
who are the very world that was entrusted to me.
The first time Ulysses appears in the Odyssey,
he is crying,
because real heroes shed tears
more than anyone else.
And why is he crying?
Because he longs for Ithaca,
his wife, his son, his father.
Calypso, the immortal and beautiful goddess,
is surprised, and asks him, "Why are you crying?
Why are you fragile, why are you mortal?"
And Ulysses replies, "Because my home lies beyond this sea".
And she begs him, "Stay with me!
I will make you immortal
and I am much more beautiful than Penelope.”
Charming, Calypso.
These goddesses who don't know death, and don't know what loving means.
And Ulysses replies,
"It's true, you're more beautiful than Penelope.
But she is my wife. She is the one I’ve chosen."
And for this reason, Ulysses
chooses mortality, chooses frailty,
chooses a small, and quite inhospitable island.
Because, there, his son Telemachus awaits, and his father, Laerte,
his wife, Penelope.
And for this we will remember him forever and ever,
because what defines our life is what we are able to love.
What defines our life is what we are able to love.
So I would like to close with the verses of a poet,
who died of cancer at 50 years of age,
and asked
for these words on his tombstone,
the verses he had written in his last poem,
"Did you receive what you wished from life, in spite of it all?
Yes.
And what did you wish for?
I wished I could say I was loved,
I wished to feel loved on Earth.
What we are able to love is what will never be ripped from us.
What we are able to love is our heritage, the rest is waste.
What we are able to love is our history".
(Applause)