That Strange Change of Questions
Simone Riva - Like every day, I arrive at school on time, to pause outside the classroom I have to enter thinking about the boys and flushing out the challenge to be welcomed that day. The door opens, a boy comes out to go to the bathroom.
He stops and asks me,” Prof. What are we doing today?” I answer him, “Let's work on your questions.” The questions that students wrote down during the first hours of school mark the path of the whole year. He, forgetting to go to the bathroom, presses, “Which ones do we tackle?” I take the list of questions de and run them through. I noticed one thing that had already jumped out at me when I first read them: they have changed from the previous year.
They are more obvious, less explosive. In tenth grade, they had written, “Why do I exist? What do I really want out of life? Why don't many professors understand kids? Who do we become?....' This year, the tenor is different: 'How do I get through the year without debt? Why is there no world peace? Will I improve my grades from last year?....” The boy looks at me and says, “Actually, they are not like last year's.” Then I asked him, “What do you think happened?”
The ringing of the bell interrupts the dialogue. I enter the classroom and we start the lesson. When I get home, I take up the question on my own. I reread the kids' questions from this year and my eye falls on this one: “Why does man change and adapt according to the place, the situation and the people he is with!” It often happens just like that: we adapt, we accommodate.
You can tell just by how our questions change and by the fact that we try to get out of them, we ask them, but we are not there. The concern becomes “how” to solve life, achieve a goal, realize an ideal. We no longer worry about “who” is called upon to deal with everything as a protagonist.
Right away, we reduce the scope of our desire, and our need, to the gait in which we are immersed, which will always do everything for it to be silent about us. We live as if we can spare ourselves from the issues that had intrigued us as well.
But, at the bottom of the list of questions, stands one that saves them all: “Why are we endowed with a part of us (the heart) that is impenetrable and indecipherable?” I tell myself that if there is one/one in the class who has written a question like that, then everything can start again.
If there is someone who has not censored himself/herself, who has not gone to the side of “how,” but has remained anchored in “who,” it can only be a provocation for everyone. As Mariangela Gualtiero writes in her poem “Without Dust Without Weight,” “But you do not believe those who paint the human as a lame beast and this world as a ball at the end. Do not believe those who dye everything in pitch blackness and blood. He does it because it is easy to do so. We are only confused, you think.
But we feel. We still feel. We are still capable of loving something. Furthermore, we still feel pity. It's your turn now, your turn to wash these scabs of the living barks. There is splendor in everything. I have seen it. I now see it more. There is splendor. Don't be afraid.” The “splendor in everything” will save us from the clumsy fascination of “like.”
The author has not revised the translation.
