Walking beyond hell

A city can be described with just two pieces of data and Turin seems to be no exception to the rule: 50% and 26% are the percentages of families made up of a single member and of families made up of two members. Added together they make 76% of the Turin population. It means that Turin is a city made up of lonely people (mostly elderly). If we add to this the growing demographic decline, the shouting on social media, the permanent resentment, we can only conclude that we are faced with a decline which, however, is not only numerical, but increasingly appears to be moral and social.

As Carlo says: «The worst aspect of unemployment is loneliness. A form of isolation that leads you to bet everything on yourself, on your abilities, on your audacity which reality slowly weakens and in the end you are left with nothing. When you're unemployed everything goes a bit at random: you wake up, you leave the house, but you don't know where to go. You start walking in the hope of meeting someone to kill time with, but without living it. You go up and down the avenues, along the streets looking for an open library, for a bus to take you somewhere you don't know, hoping, not believing, that it's the right time. Because now the opportunity, even if it arrives, you no longer see it, there is no one else who can show it to you. Loneliness appears as a form of character corrosion that only leads you to internal suicide, delivering you to bare life, compatible with everything around you because it is cancelled, literally "planed".

Without any more shocks, dreams, desires, claims and struggles, with only television entertainment to fill the void of emotions through the surrogate of ephemeral ones. «So, Carlo continues, you spend the morning on buses, in churches and in libraries, the afternoon sleeping and the evening in front of the TV, the only one that speaks to you, while the surrounding world avoids you, runs fast and doesn't he has time (he doesn't know where he's running, but he runs because the important thing is not to stop, not to think too much because it could hurt). You feel like one of many, yours is not a life, but a number that makes up a non-compact mass." Yet, in everyone there is a profound thirst for the other, but it is another who cannot be found, from whom we escape or who escapes us. "Hell is others" said Sartre, but they are also happiness: people who transmit something beautiful to you, you don't even know what to say, like a song that comes on while you're walking down the street and you're happy, even at Turin.

Fabrizio Floris
NP March 2024