Covid, Baricco is wrong: we have not given up on living

There is incalculable damage that the pandemic has caused. The kisses not given, the loves that didn't blossom, the suspended farewells, the postponed weddings, the missed walks, the forbidden hugs, the meetings made impossible, the smiles prevented, the procreations denied. The canceled concerts and trips, the canceled exhibitions, the unacted comedies and dramas, the unsung operas. Lunches and dinners in company not consumed. In short, everything that makes life worth living, as Bob Kennedy would have said. We could add pains to this accounting of non-gestures that bring joy. As anxieties about material deprivation suffered by hundreds of millions of people who have fallen below the threshold of absolute poverty.

They are incalculable damages because they have an inestimable value in themselves. And because they are not statistically measurable, as economists have known since they began to humiliate each other, more or less a century and a half ago, in an attempt to quantify utility. And recently even happiness. With results that we could define Work in progress (from the Gross Domestic Happiness that Bhutan uses instead of the GDP from the 70 to the BES indicators calculated in Italy by Istat).

It was worth it? Is it worth it? A question we asked ourselves almost a year ago, on FIRSTonline, , promising e , promising. Responding positively on the basis of awareness of what would have happened, in terms of loss of human life, if the restrictive measures had not been taken. Now it is difficult to say whether human lives or beautiful forbidden emotions are worth more. Or rather, let's go back to the sphere of the immeasurable. Someone would say: better one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep (the humble and admirable sheep may forgive him).

We would go straight back to D'Annunzio's superism, of which we feel no nostalgia. Let us add that we are disgusted by those we have heard phrases such as: "he had to die of cancer anyway", «she was already ill», «at most she would have lived six or twelve months». No one dared to say: she «she was old / o». But how many have thought that! So why don't we directly establish in law the principle that one must not live beyond a certain age?

Alessandro Baricco now asks himself the same question: is it worth it? A cultured, intelligent and refined intellectual. He still didn't give us his answer, booting instead a reflection on Il Post. A reflection in installments, as was once done with feuilletons, novels that appeared chapter by chapter in newspapers, to keep up sales (today whole books are combined, with a surcharge; old editions, while those were unpublished).

Brackets. The feuilleton genre was born at the beginning of the 800th century and in this way Balzac (Miss Cormon), Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Alexandre Dumas father (The Countess of Salisbury, The Three Musketeers e The Count of Monte Cristo), Dickens (David Copperfield), Stevenson (The black arrow), Wells (War of the Worlds), Joyce (Finnegans Wake e Ulysses), Salgari (all the adventures of Sandokan), Collodi (Pinocchio), Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment e The Karamazov brothers), Tolstoy (War and peace e Anna Karenina), Verne (Twenty thousand leagues under the seas), Conrad (Heart of Darkness), Scott Fitzgerlad (Tender is the night), convertible top (In cold blood). We wish Baricco similar imperishable success.

Therefore, ours does not immediately pull the strings. If not who would go to read the next installments. But the title of his feuilleton, Never again, and some of his theses make it easy to understand where he will end up going. In fact, he writes: «And when do we speak of this other death? The creeping death, which is not seen. There is no Dpcm that takes it into account, there are no daily graphs, officially it does not exist ». It refers to the renunciation of living fully, as we said at the beginning.

So far nothing new. The cause of this living death, discovered by Baricco, is interesting: "A lack of intelligence" which resides in the elites, capable according to him of only following the logic of there is no alternative (he uses the English acronym, so loved by Margaret Thatcher: TINA, there is no alternatives). A logic that has led, says Baricco, even to the world wars (sic!).

All those who govern us would be affected by this lack of thinking differently ("Let's make it strange," Verdone would say). Even Draghi, the only one to be nominated (Super Mario can thus add this honor to the many already received and which he will receive). Who is the perfect representative of the elite, as a former central banker. Well, but why deal with Baricco and his feuilleton? For three reasons that he pretends to ignore (being educated and without deficits he cannot really ignore them). The first and most banal can be summed up in a question: why does a perfect representative of the elites rail against his peers? The suspicion is that he does it to attract the sympathy of many readers, and to get out of the choir of the elite itself (remember a famous scene from Ecce hype, the first and memorable film by Nanni Moretti, centered on trouble: «Do I get noticed more if I come and stay to the side or if I don't come at all?»).

Second. Was there really no alternative? The alternatives were all right. Just look at what they have done at the antipodes: in New Zealand total lockdown with a few dozen cases, as well as strict supervision of compliance with the rules and great care in managing arrivals from abroad. So they were able to stay closed for a short time and then come back to life fully. Why hasn't this been done by us? Blame the elites or all of us who would never have accepted such restrictive measures in the absence of clear proof of emergency? Where was Baricco when such decisions, or no decisions, were made? Did he immediately close his valid Turin school of writing, setting a good example?

Third and most important reason. We have given up on living in order not to die, says Baricco. Well, here the dissent could not be more total. We too will have an intelligence deficit, but it seems to us that we have lived differently and sometimes more intensely. We have rediscovered values ​​that have always been clear to a select few (that is, a true elite): solidarity, altruism, brotherhood, the joy of a smile with one's eyes, ingenuity in inventing new ways of practicing art (concerts, videos). And then: the silence, the beauty of Italian cities when they are not congested by the traffic of us humans ("trappole" Montale calls them), the importance of health (when you don't have it, it's trouble), and the protection of the environment, which is heading towards destruction due to a collective intelligence deficit (other than the elite). And so on.

Let me be clear: I feel deeply and with emotion the loss of what was not. But that doesn't mean I don't see what happened. And that it would be good if we continued to have him in our thoughts and in our hearts. Otherwise it would have been a waste of life, time and vital energy. In fact, we can dare to say that life, in its ultimate meaning, can be enclosed in a similar formula (it seemed licet) to Einstein's magic one: e=mc². V=T*E. T it's time. Not only the objective one, but also the subjective one, masterfully told in the Enchanted mountain by Thomas Mann. E it is energy, not so much physical as essentially mental, made up of intellect and above all soul (as the imaginary seat of emotions). They are the two scarce resources we have.

Even in the year of the pandemic we have committed them. We lived. With totally unusual intensity and modalities. But never in vain.