“The escape of Aeneas”. in the bookshop (Solferino) and on newsstands with “Il Corriere della Sera”, is a collection of the writer’s reflections published in newspapers from 2011 to today
“The newspapers are called that because they last one day.” Antonio Scurati he does not reveal the name of the “old and now deceased writer” who years ago consoled him in this way, when he was still a young man of letters “unknown to cynicism”, to overcome the bitterness of an unpleasant review. The Corriere della Sera that readers now have in their hands is intrinsically something that lives only one day. But Scurati, as a writer who has been working on the “everyday tool” for years, knows very well that a newspaper tells what is happening at that moment, knowing and memorizing what is behind it but completely ignoring the future. That is, to quote the unknown elderly writer, newspapers last one day but are databases of the present and the past, waiting for the next day: therefore for tomorrow. A constant and unstoppable launching pad that constitutes the unspeakable fascination of the newspaper-product and journalistic work. And here, perhaps, by express admission of the author, is the possible key to reading the new book The escape of Aeneas. S.keep the city on fire (Solferino), a collection of 22 interventions which appeared over a decade first in «La Stampa» and then in «Corriere della Sera».
Scurati, in the introduction, claims to have identified in the various stages not an obvious common thread but “an ascending parable“:” If at the beginning of the arc the prevailing tone is the harsh, heartfelt and disheartened one of militant social criticism, at the end these writings rise in altitude towards a tone that is always heartfelt but, paradoxically, more hopeful, more open not so much to possibility of change as to its necessity “. Many of the articles, says Scurati, taking stock of his journalistic production, “seismograph the telluric tremors of an Italian crisis of more than thirty years”. But in the last year for Scurati we have emerged from this crisis certainly not because it has been resolved, «but because the crisis has become a drama. Historical, social and epochal drama ». Stopping here, the journey certainly could not be the ascending parable they spoke of. Instead, says the author, social criticism “must give way to the tragic necessity of rebirth, pass the baton to another form of wisdom, not at all cynical: the ancient wisdom of those who have always known, from what world world, which in order to continue to live one must always be reborn ». In these times dominated by uncertainty and pessimism, Scurati sees the ascending parable of that “peculiar wisdom” which “belongs to things, not so much and not only to the words with which we anxiously try to testify to them. I hope not to be wrong, not to be wrong ». The word optimism does not appear, but there is the impetus to continue living. Especially to be reborn.
Keeping this route in mind, the analysis of forty-year-olds (11 March 2011) as “teenagers deprived” of their future becomes understandable, a theme that returns in an intervention in 2019 when it comes to understanding why generation X born between 1960 and 1980 had so few children, immersed as she was “in a constant Saturday night, always ready to go to a party” (quote from David Leavitt). And here is the parable that arises: «We demand legislative measures from our politicians centered on the criterion of the future but we remind ourselves that they will remain sterile if not accompanied by a new cultural orientation and, even, by a spiritual rebirth. Laws will not be enough, nor will cultural changes. Being in time is the prerogative of the spirit ». Spiritual and spirit rebirth, that’s the point. To propose another very compelling example in these hours in which the Luca Coscioni Association announces that it has exceeded the 750 thousand signatures for the referendum on legal euthanasia, here is what Scurati wrote on 28 September 2019: “Anyone who opposes the faculty of individual to decide on his own life, he does so in the name of a principle to which that life is subordinated, thus taking away its fullness, freedom, sovereignty and dignity … I am for euthanasia because I hold the hand of the dying person, while he is still himself , it is the highest form of pity we are capable of. It is our destiny. It is the ultimate gesture in which the essence of the human is recapitulated ».
The essence of the human is community, being together, sharing “politically” (clearly in the sense of polis) the adventure of life. The author writes in the intervention that closes the book (“The sense of an early period”, May 8, 2021): “A terrible trial like that of Covid can only crash us if it is experienced by each of us individually as private citizen but can instead turn into a restorative effort if a political dimension is reborn from it. Beyond the cabals on the rates of contagion and the weeds around the curfew, the only way out of this epochal crisis seems to me the one that leads to a new season of civil commitment and political struggle. No individual, left to himself, has a shred of chance against a pandemic ». And then, along the course of the articles, they are found university and school analysis, on the knot of the relationship with death in this terrified contemporaneity, especially a lot of material on the different waves of Covid.
As for the title chosen for the collection here The escape of Aeneas (recent, March 21, 2021). Scurati tackles the issue of vaccinations by placing it on a transgenerational level and using the archetype of Aeneas fleeing Troy holding his father Anchises on his shoulders and his son Ascanio by the hand. He returns to the theme of the decline in births, seen (rightly) as a time bomb: «Italy, by now we know, is having fewer and fewer children. In twenty years there has been a decrease of 20 percent. The demographic balance is, from year to year, more and more negative. If it depended on us Italians today, the future of the species would be extinction ». We must “create the conditions for an infertile society to stop being so” and “finally guarantee gender equality starting with the world of work because, in addition to the fundamental issues of equity and justice, it is now certain that the confinement of women in the hypothetical role of mother contributes, among other things, to the decline in births ». Here is one of the most significant proofs, even on an etymological level, of the “Tragic need for rebirth” that Scurati entrusts to the reader in the introduction. The future must be entrusted to the children, in any case to those who will come after us: «There are many ways of generating, well beyond biological reproduction. The myth of Aeneas tells us that, faced with the drama of destruction, politics should appeal to all those who, in the most varied forms and ways, generate or have generated. A city cannot be refounded if Ascanio’s hand remains empty ». The archetype becomes contemporary and risks being amputated in its most substantial part, the prospect of the future. So “the city is on fire”, certainly yes, Aeneas is abandoning it, but the future and rebirth are possible. Aeneas can save himself, the present, and Anchises, or the past. But it is essential to think of Ascanio, who is tomorrow.
September 2, 2021 (change September 2, 2021 | 10:55)
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