The Art of Destiny

Mario Calabresi - Alessandro D’Avenia - A Conversation on Time, Nostalgia, and the Journey to Self-Discovery

Mario Calabresi: Here I am!

Alessandro D’Avenia: There you are! Well found!!! How are you doing?

Mario Calabresi:: Very Well, Thank you.

Alessandro D’Avenia: So, what are we talking about today?

Mario Calabresi: I remember that one of the things that struck me most about the way you spoke to the kids was something you said. Maybe it was one of the first times we had a meeting together. It was the idea that kids need to be given a sense of nostalgia for the future.

I was very fond of that phrase; in fact, I steal it from you and repeat it. I'll give you the copyright, I promise. I always say that this idea of building nostalgia for the future, this idea of building a kind of bridge between the present, the future, and also the past—because nostalgia is a thing of the past—comes from Alessandro D'Avenia.

This bridge helps us get out of the present moment. Because in the last couple of years, the thing I've been thinking about the most is our relationship with time. In the end, we are kind of immersed in the present; there is so much present, so many things, especially digital things, in this time, in this present, that it becomes a dilated present that is so cumbersome that it eats the idea of the future and it eats the past, the memory. So this bridge of yours fascinates me because I find it a bit of an answer to a question that I ask myself, which is how can we succeed today in putting importance back at the center of our existences instead of urgency. Our day is dictated by urgency, and then we forget about importance.

Alessandro D’Avenia: yes, look, this issue is very close to my heart because of the fact that you have the kids for a very specific period of time. You have to follow them for five years or for three years, depending a little bit on what the school calendar dictates, and it forces you to be absolutely present. But it's a presence that has to take charge of what has arrived. I believe that we have removed the idea of destiny that the Greeks had given us and replaced it with that of a career, which is no less demanding because it has very strong obligations, just as much as destiny did.

But while destiny is about something that was decided in the past—because for them the past, where they had established things, was untouchable; you would tragically enter that dimension and never come out again—today it is the idea of a career that makes our destiny. You have to enter into something that will guarantee you a happy future, which cannot be anything less than success. So what does that graft into the hearts and minds of these kids? Immediately? Anxiety.

That is, you are obligated to stick to a script, and you have to stick to it in a big way. Think about the absurdity of the expression "real time" that we invented, which simply means that something comes to you as fast as it can and therefore that basically time is true when it's fast. But I don't think it occurs to you to listen to your favorite song twice as fast so you can hear it twice as often, because you don't enjoy it.

Mario Calabresi: So, this idea of future nostalgia comes to me from that, from having to combine these elements that you put together. It's about transforming what, for the Greeks, was the concept of destiny, which seems to me a very healthy concept. In what sphere, in the sphere of saying "something happened to you that you didn't choose, life with everything in it?" But the specific human task is to turn destiny into a destination. That is, what do I do with these ingredients? Whereas today, what is being preached left and right by the dominant culture—and in school we should be defending kids from this—is to "become what you want." The Greeks used to say "become what you are."

Now, that "six" (perhaps) was so binding that it became a tragic cage. We maybe move, we can move. A mediation between these two paradigms is to become what you are, where this "six" can evolve, i.e., from destiny can become destination. I don't know if you...

It makes sense, and I like it a lot. I wish I had known about this earlier.

Alessandro D’Avenia: Now that your daughters are coming to the threshold of maturity, it seems to me that you will experience it... They live it.

Mario Calabresi: That's right. But this thing about destiny... there is one thing about destiny: you choose a destination, you choose a route, you choose a trajectory. And so you don't have to do the math every minute of every day; you don't have the urgency to run the 100 meters, you know, it's a marathon. And so there can be changes of pace; there is the moment when you are fatigued, the moment when you break, the moment when you restart. There are many, many moments in this. And then it is very personal; destiny is an intimate, deep matter, it's mine. Choices have to be deep choices to justify destiny. Instead, a career must give satisfactory answers to so many subjects outside. So I have to put on masks to satisfy the career, and it doesn't depend on whether there...

Alessandro D’Avenia: If you think about it, the word “career” means speed. That is, to go fast. A career already gives you anxiety. It seems to me that you start from this very question in the most recent book you wrote. From the anxiety of a girl who felt compelled to have a big career.

Mario Calabresi: The girl, this one I called "The Time of the Woods," which is deliberately a very slow time, the time of the woods. But why this girl, a medical student, she told me: “I study, I read books, I intern in the hospital, I studied English very well, I volunteer, and I do all these things.” Yet all the time I hear, “Eh, but sports, group sports. Because group sports, you know, it makes a difference, it's another thing. Languages. Two languages would be important.” And meanwhile, they dig into me. And one certainly helps a lot if one has had an experience, for example, in an African hospital. And I feel like it's never enough. The bar is always higher; I never get there. And she started to cry.

So I say in the book—to her I didn't have the courage to tell her—I was saying, “Look who you're looking at. You are asking advice from someone who came, studied, got to the end, but then never graduated.” I never graduated, much to my mother's chagrin. Why? Because I started to be a journalist, and so I could say I got lost, or I got very passionate about it, and so I never, I never discussed the dissertation. What she kindled in me was this feeling that there is the perfect path, the perfect career, as if there is an algorithm that decides.

I mean, there's an artificial intelligence that says if you do these things, sure, then you'll make it. The problem is, if you do those things, it's not certain that you'll make it, but it's especially not certain that you'll then be satisfied, be happy. So this makes me think that you really need to rethink and take back inside a feeling of this. Now I really like this feeling of destiny more than that of a career.

Alessandro D’Avenia: Yes, also because, in my opinion, it restores the proper prominence to life. This topic of nostalgia for the future, I take it from the Odyssey, to which I have devoted the last efforts of these years. If you think about it, it begins—it doesn't begin with the hero, it doesn't begin with Odysseus (he appears in the fifth chapter)—it begins with the son of the hero.

The first four [chapters] are dedicated to Telemachus, and Telemachus is already a speaking name. I remember we also talked about it on another occasion because there is, inside this, "tele," which is our daily life: the telephone, the television, everything that is "tele" from afar. And then he adds that Greek verb, the verb of fighting, but with the hand, Marino, and so it is he who fights from afar. 

Because when the scene in the Odyssey opens, he is a little boy, a teenager in tears because he does not have a destiny yet; he has not accepted his own destiny. He complains that his father is not there and that the suitors, who are big and fat, defile him and treat him badly. So Athena, when she comes down from Olympus, after she gets permission from Zeus to finally let poor Odysseus return, goes to Ithaca and goes to him.

She goes to Telemachus to tell him, in the guise of a mentor, one of his father's friends—because the gods never manifest themselves directly—“Stop with those childish ways.” And he uses a beautiful Greek term, "nepios," that is, he who still has neither “that” nor an “epos,” the word, which then becomes the epic, a tale. And then he wakes up there and says... And mentor Athena tells him, "If your father doesn't come back, go find him."

That is, he is turning the reason for a prison, a cry that does not become growth, into a call. “Go after him. And if, in going to look for him, he has to risk the sea—which for a Homeric man means risking his life—[and] you find out that he is dead... So you find that your own origin that you long for is dead... You become your own father. That is, you are called to be the new king.” That is, what might have seemed a condition of worthlessness and blockage becomes the calling. This is the thing that Homer then devotes four chapters to.

He has to get the ship, the companions. The first chapter ends with him pulling on the sheep fleece, he says, and he stayed up all night thinking about what he was going to start the next day on the voyage. The idea you used to give of destination—but it's something that, as you see, was born from within, awakened by someone outside, the mentor, any educator has that function. 

Whereas the career, what it has that is not born from within, is a set of dictates, of performances to be achieved to be precisely accepted within a context that wants those characteristics. So then at some point you get exhausted because the energy is not internal, as we call them. In companies, we talk about human resources; that is, since we started saying that humans are resources, it is over because resources are made to be exhausted. In fact, we are all exhausted. I don't know if you see this, and what answer you have found in this search for healing. Look at contemporary anxiety.

Mario Calabresi: Let me tell you one thing about how much wisdom there is in Homer and the ancient Greeks, this idea that... Today, how much do we rely on the advice of others? How much do we listen to other teachers? There are so many things that fragment our attention. Then the fact of attributing and saying gods come in other guises, it's a way of saying, "Listen to who you meet." Now that's a great thing because you need to trust somebody. Then Sai says...

Alessandro D’Avenia: There is a rabbi who says the first thing God will ask us in the afterlife is, "Who was your teacher? What did you learn from him?" It's almost as if to listen to a master is precisely a matter of being steadfast or not in life. It came to my mind, about that, listening, but I went...

Mario Calabresi: Do you know what I do when an idea gets stuck in my head? I act like a diviner and go looking for stories. I look for everything around me that I think might have a resemblance to this story, and so eventually I moved on, precisely on the axis of time interpretation, I thought.

The answer to anxieties lies in re-appropriating a kind of time that is different from “real time,” but that is a time in which you have the space to understand things. For example, I went and spent two days in the hermitage of Camaldoli, in a cell, living the life of the friars there because I wanted to experience a rhythm that is a medieval rhythm.

At a certain point at 5:30 in the morning—there's no phone, there's no radio, there's no television, there's no signal, there's no Wi-Fi, there's nothing—you have to subject yourself to rhythms that are completely different from what we are used to. For me, living with a smartphone, consumption is eight hours a day.

Just imagine, for 48 hours, this thing is off. When, at 5:30, the bell rings, calling for prayer, I went into this church and all the monks were in their hoods because it was early in the morning and a little cold. I looked around, and there was no sign to tell me what era we were in. I mean, we could easily have been in the Middle Ages. And the thing that struck me was the slowness of the prayer, the slowness with which they spoke the words. So after breakfast, I went to talk to the archivist, the librarian. You may know him; Don Ubaldo Curtoni is his name. And I asked him why the words were so slow.

And he told me, “Think, I had been to the Carthusians, who are the last remaining cloistered people, and I spent a few days with them to understand their sense of time.” He had had the same experience as me, but two-point-zero, going to the Carthusians. And he says, “The Carthusians pronounce the words of the liturgy with an extreme slowness because they say you have to give time to the words to go through them because if you don't live the word and you don't go through it, the word doesn't leave its mark on you, it doesn't color you.”

And I find that a great thing. That is, you have to give back time, for example, to words. Give back time to the one thing that I now think we have to get away from: this dictatorship whereby you have to have, every day, a very clear opinion on the topic of the day, and you have to have it immediately, instinctive, Pavlovian. So instead, take the freedom to say, “No, but I need to know, to understand,” and I want to have the freedom to say, “I don't know. I don't have an opinion because I don't understand it yet.”

Alessandro D’Avenia: Even there, in my opinion, there is the theme of having to maintain a certain performance. Because if you don't have an opinion on something, you are out, you are out of the debate. And so the thing is, nothing happens if one is out. It goes well, "I'm out." It didn't occur to me that basically, in school, we do this.

That is, if home exists as protection from the weather, so we go home, to school instead you go there; that is, you leave home, and it is the first big ritual of our life outside of home. And what do you go to school for? School is where you train your attention to what in the world does not pass by. If you think about it, because if I learn the laws of thermodynamics, Dante Alighieri, Homer, the table of elements, I am getting closer to what remains alive in the world.

Why is that true? And what do you do in the class hour? You train the kids, after you train yourself, to do what you were saying, which is that the things that don't pass can reach you because otherwise they don't have the time to do it.

And in this regard, I'm reminded of that beautiful verse of Dante when he meets Brunetto Latini, who was his teacher. Dante puts him in hell, but anyway, to remind us that we teachers, however we end up, are in hell for the students, he says to me, “I remember your dear, fatherly image, when, hour by hour, you taught me how man [is] eternal.” 

And that I adore. I adore this idea precisely of the training of attention, which is what then multiplies time, makes the word reach you as the eternal man. That is, as man, approaching that which does not die, that which is alive, living life, becomes himself alive. And in fact, I say the most beautiful thing about school is its class hours. When... But how tiring it must be to be with the kids! Instead, it seems to me just the most, the most right thing you can do, just when the unit of measure between past, present, and future is... Is the time for the ones there, these lives that you train attention to.

Mario Calabresi: Anyway, every time you can squeeze in a moment of significance. A moment of significance. And I can also tell you about a free moment. I mean, when I say "gratuitous," I think of unexpected things, to leave the door open a little bit to the unexpected. That is, not knowing exactly everything you have to do, planning it beforehand, but leaving moments where things can happen that you didn't prepare for, because in that moment, something pops out at you that can be good or bad.

I'll give you an example. I did an experiment for a month; I tried not to buy on Amazon, not to buy online. But why did I do that? Not because of an ideological issue. I did it because I wanted to see and mark in a little notebook the kind of experiences I had. Some days were disastrous evenings, like when I had to buy printer toner. Instead of clicking, like I always do automatically, and it comes to my house and I don't even notice it, I went and found a place I didn't know, etc., etc., and it started pouring. I went out without an umbrella and came back soaked. I thought, "Why do I have to experiment?"

 In the meantime, though, I don't know... Doing other things, I found two friends, a basketball partner, and a schoolmate in two stores I hadn't been to in a long time. We stopped and chatted. I found out that he opened a restaurant that I now go to regularly. And I went to the bookstore to buy a book and came out with four because on the counters you find something that... The algorithm is not always smart enough to really know me. It especially doesn't know that I can come up with ideas, which are weird, divergent ideas, and all the same. So this thing here, of keeping open, in my opinion... because all the days that have even one of these things, in my opinion, those are the days that remain memorable.

Alessandro D’Avenia: Oh yes, it's what used to be called “grace,” and now we don't know what it is. In fact, we're kind of “disgraced,” unfortunate. But you reminded me that I used to have this ritual a while ago. I used to go to a bookstore that, unfortunately, has now closed, and the person in charge of the books would prepare about ten titles and tell me about them one by one, knowing my tastes and my interests a little bit. And then I could freely choose. In the end, I would come out with all ten books because just the fact that someone had prepared for me the summary, the narration, by adapting it to my tastes, it already seemed to me that it was a gift that I could not refuse. And I remember this person, this delicacy, this care that you talk about. 

And it connects, in my opinion, closely the theme of the space of time to the theme of space. That is, in this experience, what you say you recovered is a space. I mean, even the rain that comes at you is kind of what has changed precisely because you have the phone in your hand. That is, now the experience comes to us; it's not us going to the world, it's the world invading us.

There is a theme that needs to be asked about: do we really experience the world when the world comes to us and we are passive in it? Or is experience that of a body going to the world? This is a theme I see especially for boys because then their very body is the place where the poverty of experience is manifesting, so much so that with this body then they have to do something to know that they are in the world, from the difficulties sometimes of physical problems of widespread... When I started teaching, there were almost none. Now anorexia, bulimia... the whole body becomes precisely the place of a search for an experience that is not given otherwise.

And so this space, this time... I was reflecting on it a few days ago, writing for the newspaper column, that in Italian we are fortunate to have this word “minute,” which is both the unit of measurement of 60 seconds, but it is also what is small. And so I was trying to make a “praise of the minute,” as if precisely we only have this possible dimension of happiness: to be inside the minute and let that minute be, maybe, full of grace. However, it is a challenge. You have to go out and meet the world.

Mario Calabresi: Something to keep in mind: I was talking to an astrophysicist named Ersilia Vaudo who told me a little bit about space. I'm ignorant of everything about space, but it fascinates me to look at it. She was telling me that what is further away in space is more ancient. We look at a star, and that light that reaches us today may have been emitted when Dante was born. And the sunset, when we say here, "It has set," instead, it happened 7 minutes earlier. So I realized that there are some…

We are used to imagining that the future is ahead, the past is behind. But there are populations, for example, in the Andes or in Borneo, who instead say that the past is in front because we can see it. The future, you don't see it; it's behind us. And if you think about it, this tells us that it is the same as what is happening in the cosmos and in space. That is, what we see is more... is the past. 

And so this idea here that we see lights today that are hundreds of years old or thousands of years old, I find that very fascinating because it's like it reminds us that we are immersed in something that denies the fact that everything happens in real time. Because instead, there are phenomena like everything we see, there are phenomena that are deferred, and that tells us that we, we are in deferred time.

I like to analyze my own behaviors sometimes. I don't know, about how I eat, about how I make one gesture or another. I don't know, to tell you, I do this with my hair often, like this. And one day my mother told me, "That gesture, it was a gesture of your father."

So I lived with my father for two and a half years, but probably if you see a two-and-a-half-year-old child, he copies the father. And I took this gesture. So what do I do? I make an ancient gesture that is not from this present moment; it is a gesture that is more than 50 years old. And so, in my opinion, recognizing how much past and how much accumulated experience there is in our lives is something that gives you a much better, much fuller feeling.

Alessandro D’Avenia: Because if you think about it, in the Greek mythical landscape, the Muses, who are precisely deputed to beauty, are the daughters of Zeus and memory. That is, it was very clear to them that beauty has the task of awakening a past. If not, they would not be daughters of memory, and that awakened past becomes in those who receive it a proposal for the future.

This is the interesting thing because beauty urges you to action; it is never comfortable. That is why the poet at the beginning of the poem invokes the Muse because he does not know what has happened. He has to be told by someone who does know, because he has seen the way things are. And yet, that then pushes. And like when we go to see, precisely, the stars, on a night when you can distinguish the Milky Way or the shooting stars, and you feel in that beauty a provocation that asks you, "But where do you stand?" With the gifts of life, that is, us, so ancient and so fulfilled, we put you in crisis that it is now your turn, that someday there may be someone who receives that past of you.

And since you were talking about stars, astrophysicists, I am also very ignorant and very curious about these things, and I have befriended Marco Bersanelli, who is an astrophysicist who is doing research on the bottom of the universe. That is, he is studying what's behind the oldest photograph that we have of the universe, which is almost 14 billion years old, and then understanding what's behind this extended light that you see in this last photograph, understanding how this light got into motion.

These are things for the ignorant, inconceivable to those who know. Mysteries to be explored. But I remember we were talking about these things over a pizza. He at one point stops and says, "Do you see, Alessandro? Anyway, what matters is that there are two people talking about these things while eating a pizza. I mean, this pizza is 14 billion years old, even though it was just made."

And that moment, there was a moment of our friendship that was beautiful for me, because actually, this whole thing is because the two of us are having this talk now. If I also think about how we met, how the friendship came about, it's a conspiracy of the universe that brought us here to tell us things that we like, that we care about.

Mario Calabresi: No, this is about encounters again. Things, if you want, a little bit maybe even trivial, I self-report. But for example, lately I try to change my way, even to go to the same places. That is, for example, when I go to my mother's. There is an easy way that I walk. Now I change my way all the time to look around and give myself... however, I keep my phone in my pocket because if I look at my phone, it is useless for me to change my way. It's better if I take the usual way, but look at you, look outside, and because I always think, whatever, what?

Without wanting to condemn the phone—by the way, Straw uses it—however, in what you were saying, in that passivity, I think, I look at the phone, especially social media, and I see others telling me the places I am, but looking at the places they are, I am not in the place I should be. So why do I always think... Why do you always think that what other people are doing is better, is more interesting? Also because then, especially on Instagram, it's always told in a certain way. Everything is glamorous, everything is beautiful. There was a great thing that an American newspaper did, I don't remember anymore which one. It put together how Instagram portrayed the Amalfi Coast and the reality of the Amalfi Coast.

I mean, he was taking pictures of a beautiful place with this beautiful view, and everybody was saying, "I want to go there too, how wonderful!" And then he would show that to get there you had to walk 400 steps under the blazing sun, that he was sweating, that there was no place to buy water, and I said, "Okay, but we also show you everything around it because the context is missing."

So I keep thinking that we have to catch up with times when we say, "Okay, but I try to make my experience, that little destiny, that going to my mother's house, my experience—I live this one." And instead of watching other people's [experiences], and then especially now and then also who cares to share it, I can also keep it to myself. It is not obligatory.

A famous DJ said that he was in Mykonos or Ibiza and he did a concert, and there was not a single person dancing because it was full, but everyone was still taking videos with their cell phones and then reviewing the concert. You know? So that's the theme of... Of saying, “No, but wait, because I have to record it, otherwise, it doesn't exist. I have to ‘experience’ it, otherwise, it doesn't exist.”

Alessandro D’Avena: Yes, but it has to do with the concept that we have of happiness, then of joy. Because, by the way, from the scientific point of view, while dopamine is that discharge of joy that comes from something external that we can cause, even artificially, serotonin is called the hormone of happiness. You can reproduce it as often as you remember something that you experienced; that is, you can be happy on command. If I think back to that pizza with Bersanelli, I am happy because I produce those same hormones from that evening, which dopamine cannot do.

And we are instead in a dopaminergic system where that consensus that we get because we posted that we are at that concert makes us feel like somebody. But to feel like somebody, just feel alive without having to share it, then maybe you share it. With whom? With the people you are close to, you love. That's more than enough.

Mario Calabresi: And it strikes me that you're telling me these things because on this trip that I took one of the people that I interviewed was my high school desk mate who became a neuroscientist and he studies sleep consciousness and just the mechanisms of dopamine. 

And I talked to him about this about how we tend today the whole world of algorithms is built To continually give us discharges that give us that give us satisfaction. We continually need however we are continually abstinent to have something new, continually, so you go, pick up your phone and do this round and see if I have messages on WhatsApp, what's on Instagram? The emails? Has anybody called notifications? And you're constantly doing this round, always hoping that there's something new that gives you, that gives you a stimulus. So here and back to your beginning. We are. …But unfortunately, this road is far from a destiny, especially because destiny cannot be built with a sum of experiences of a few seconds.

Alessandro D’Avenia: It is what is called the “infinite villain.” To think that if we put so many finite things one after another, united, we will reach infinity. But it doesn't work that way. Infinity is a qualitative matter, not a quantitative matter.

Mario Calabresi: That reminds me of something that maybe you can explain to me after so many years. In my high school, the teacher was talking about Zeno of Elea, the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, which was the notion that if you attacked time in a sum of instants, time remained still, so Achilles never reached the tortoise.

Alessandro D’Avenia: But maybe we kind of need this note, this paradox. Today, I was seeing that you titled the book "The Time of the Woods," and thinking precisely of the ancients, [I] remembered that the last episode of the Odyssey is about Odysseus arriving in the garden where his father has retired. He can't stand being in the palace where there are suitors and all that, and he doesn't recognize his son who has returned. The son, to make himself recognized, tells him one by one the names of the trees that he, as a child, had been taught. He says, "Here were the 15 apple trees."

He says the names one by one, and then almost [suggests] that the father-son relationship, and then in general any relationship where someone hands something over to someone else, is this time of the forest, of saying the names again as they should be said. And at that point, the father recognizes the son when he feels that the son has made those names his own; before, from mere appearance, he had not recognized him.

Mario Calabresi: Beautiful! Thank you.

Alessandro D’Avenia: Thank you. We needed another hour or so. Maybe we'll get together on our own.

Mario Calabresi: Bye.

English. Spanish. French. German. Italian. Portuguese Russian. Chinese.

YouTube English YouTube Italian

Disclaimer

We do not hold the copyright for these transcriptions.

This content is published for personal and educational use only.

The translation has not been revised or approved by the original authors.

We are not responsible for any errors or inaccuracies in the transcription or translation.

Fair Use Notice

The use of these transcriptions is believed to constitute fair use under applicable copyright laws. We are relying on fair use principles for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research. If you believe that any use of the transcriptions on this site infringes upon your copyright, please contact us immediately.