The son of the journalist and writer edited an abridged version of «The end is my beginning», the collection of conversations released in 2006. The «redux» edition is entitled «End / Beginning» and is released by Tea on Thursday 14 April. Here we anticipate the unpublished preface
I remember them as some of the best months we spent together. And it is strange since he, the traveler, was preparing for the last great journey.
Era the spring of over fifteen years ago and we were sitting outside, on the lawn, overlooking these beautiful mountains, while the cuckoo sang in the background. There was ease, a lot of time ahead and nothing to do but chat. He kept himself energetic and dignified, always dressed well, in white, and when asked how he was doing, he replied: “Very well!”
He faced the final adventure like this.
I, of course, was intrigued. Although I knew him from my first day, I struggled to understand how he could see that departure for the unknown as a natural, almost pleasant thing. I wanted her to explain what she understood.
It is said that in the moments before dying all life passes by like a movie. Titian, my fatherinstead, he had decided to take a few weeks, or maybe even a few months if it suited him, to review his.
Exactly how long he had left no one could know, the deadline hung over us all like a sword of Damocles. Under the maple we had a fixed appointment, more or less every day, except when the Santa couldn’t make it. I recorded our conversations and then, in the evening, transcribed them. After three months, when he asked me where we were, and I told him I had no more questions, he stopped talking and two days later he leftleaving me with over twelve hundred pages of text.
From that mass of material I had to make a book.
Someone had expressed doubts about the project, in particular about the form of the dialogue-book which, he said, does not work today. The Father and I, however, had thought about it and had retorted that after all the writings of Plato are dialogues, as well as the texts of ancient Indian spirituality such as the Bhagavadgita and the Upanisadof which the most famous is the dialogue between a boy and none other than Death itself, considered the greatest of all teachers. Evidently, in other times, the dialogue had worked well. “Try it!” We said.
While I was transcribing our conversations, I really liked the sound of that raw, natural spoken language, and I wanted to give the rhythm of the speech, the silences, the small hesitations, sometimes even the swear word that escapes in the writing. I wanted to hear the voice of an old man who is speaking to us, directly, without adding that patina of elaborations and filings that would have transformed it into literature. It is when someone speaks sincerely that words come straight to your heart.
Besides, he spoke well. He had a very simple way of explaining things: a thought doesn’t need to be complicated to be true, quite the contrary. And he had always been one who with his stories managed to enchant whole tables.
At a certain point, then, I also began to record moments of our daily life, such as when, for example, we sat down to eat. So, a little by mistake, I found myself some humorous scenes (like that of potatoes that are too hard) which also revealed its contradictions and its very human side.
Having recently come out of film school, it came naturally to me not only to report his stories and reflections, but to stage them as a piece of theater that unfolds before our eyes with these two lines of the story, one on the thread of the past, in which experiences accumulate in a crescendo of awareness, the other in the present where health rapidly declines. I immersed myself in that work of reducing the original material and after many months, exhausted, I said: «Enough, it’s finished!».
The first person who read the text, an “expert”, said to me: “Well, the material is interesting, now of course everything has to be rewritten …”. Implied: a good book must be “well written”.
“No, that’s how it ended!” I insisted, and I left to be with a tribe in the middle of the Amazon, away from it all, to learn to tie the roof of a hut with lianas and to eat crocodile eggs. When I emerged from the forest and called home I found that the publisher had read the manuscript, welcomed it as it was, and was preparing for the first edition a launch as big as my Santa in his life had never. seen. I had to get rid of the mud as soon as possible and go back to Italy.
The title came at the last moment. During our chats we had tentatively oriented ourselves on The longest journey, who really wasn’t very inspired. Nothing better had emerged and so it was about to go to print, at which I got agitated: “This is the worst title in the world!” So what was I suggesting? “Any title would be better, any! Also, I don’t know … the end is my beginning! ”, Which was a phrase I had just reread in the text.
“Perfect!” was the comment of the editor, “The end is my beginning».
Why now, End / Start?
I simply wanted to bring back the original dialogue in a “redux” version – returned to life, reduced by more than 50 percent and accompanied by many colored photos – to the new generation that already looks beyond the problems of politics and the economy to seek a connection with the wider world. To do this, it was necessary not to add, but to remove. As Voltaire joked, “I’m writing you a long letter because I don’t have time to write a short one.” This is the attempt to write the short letter. Returning to the text after a few years, it was easier for me to understand which were the essential, “universal” parts, the most “useful” parts in this historical moment and those which also contain, interwoven between the stories of travels to distant places, a philosophy perennial. The war in Vietnam no young person knows what it is anymore, but the problem of war never goes away, it is always current.
What Titian proposes is not the life of success or of money or power. But it is not the life of the ascetic either. He himself has always been well planted in the world with his job as a journalist who must check the facts, with his solid family and the house full of Chinese antiques and Afghan rugs. He tried to personally face the great questions of existence, without taking them back from the sacred texts of the religions of the world, which he too knew. His was a secular spirituality, very concrete, which then translates into an invitation to everyone to reflect, to look “behind the truth of the facts” and to be free to create their own life instead of returning to one of the boxes that are ready for us. Sometimes he has also tried to lead a more ascetic life, like when he went to live in a cabin in the Himalayas, above the clouds at 2,400 meters; but then he was ready to throw himself back into the world and among the people, to participate in huge anti-war demonstrations, to speak in schools, convents, prisons – everywhere except on television, which he recently refused. Most of all he liked talking to the boys, because they have an open and alert soul while, he said, the grown-ups are already fixed in their ideas and have more difficulty in changing course: maybe they say “interesting”, then they turn the page and take a Cappuccino.
There are many professions, many paths to get to the top of the mountain. There may be a shepherd or a just king, an ascetic, a dancer, a colonel or a cigarette seller on the street, perhaps a banker or, as Titian said, even an expert on ants. His way was to be a journalist: travel to see the world, witness the great historical events of his time, observing the dreams of revolutions and then wars, knowing deeply, even with love, the cultures of different peoples, always trying to maintain the discipline of the accuracy of the facts. Journalism was his way to go towards the goal, even if, further on he went, he always remembered that we are not our job, that there is something much greater that we are all part of and to which, you may think, we come back when this body we leave.
Perhaps what he was proposing was to see your life as a great opportunity to take a tripboth outside and inside.
All the most important stories, like the emblematic one of the Buddha, for one thing, have been told so many times that over time the strongest elements have been distilled. I really like going back to an old story, which has had time to settle down, instead of always trying to invent a new one. Over the years you realize what has lasting value and what is transitory, and only time can tell you this, then and there you can’t grasp it. A bit like pop music: what success this month will there be again next year? Who knows. What do you remember about the last film, even after only a few days, what did it leave you? Here, that is the essential. The rest, which seemed beautiful to you at the time, was just entertainment.
This tale is basically about how to lead a good life. A life that can be complete, intense and worth living, so you can get to the bottom of it without feeling afraid or lost, but satisfied. Hidden among the words is a map of its major stages, the important stages that lie ahead of each of us: from the rapid learning of youth, to responsibility for work and family, to retreat to nature and the final conclusions. It is a sparkling, sparkling, vital exit from the scene. But every exit is an entrance from somewhere else, every end is a new beginning!
(© 2022 TEA S.R.L, MILANO/PUBLISHED BY ARRANGEMENT WITH THE ITALIAN LITERARY AGENCY)
The unprecedented
Thursday 14 April comes out for Tea, curated by Folco Terzani, End / Start. Essential edition of “The end is my beginning”. Questions and answers on how to make a living by Folco and Tiziano Terzani (Tea, pp. 269, € 14.90). The volume, an abridged version of the book published by Longanesi in 2006, is preceded by the unpublished preface by Folco which we anticipate in its entirety here. Tiziano Terzani (Florence, 1938 – Orsigna, Pistoia, 2004) lived for over thirty years in the Far East, with his wife Angela Staude and their children Folco and Saskia, working as a journalist for the German weekly “Der Spiegel” and subsequently collaborating with other newspapers and then with “the Corriere della Sera”. His books by him, published in Italy by Longanesi and translated into many languages, tell the great historical events he witnessed (from the war in Vietnam to 11 September). Among his latest books, A soothsayer told me, Letters against the war, Another round of the carousel e The end is my beginning. Tulle’s works are collected in two volumes by Meridiani Mondadori curated by Àlen Loreti. Folco Terzani (New York, 1969) grew up in Asia and studied philosophy in Cambridge and film in New York. He has made documentaries including Mother Teresa’s first loveafter spending nearly a year as a volunteer in Calcutta, e Twilight Men, on his periods with the Indian ascetics of the Himalayas. In The end is my beginning collected his latest conversations with his father Tiziano, then writing the screenplay for the film of the same name. He posted Barefoot on the ground (Mondadori, 2013), Ultra (on extreme running, with Michele Graglia, Sperling & Kupfer, 2017) e The dog, the wolf and God (Longanesi, 2017).
The book will be presented on Sunday 15 May in Udine (4 pm, Loggia del Lionello) as part of the eighteenth edition of the Near / Far festival in Udine, dedicated to the theme “Challenges”. Folco Terzani will talk to Àlen Loreti. As always, the festival hosts the ceremony for the awarding of the Tiziano Terzani International Literary Prize, which it promotes together with the Terzani family: appointment on Saturday 14 May at the Teatro Nuovo Giovanni da Udine. Info: vicinolontano.it
April 10, 2022 (change April 10, 2022 | 19:53)
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