3
" My mother delayed my enrollment in the Fascist scouts, the Balilla, as long as possible, firstly because she did not want me to learn how to handle weapons, but also because the meetings that were then held on Sunday mornings (before the Fascist Saturday was instituted) consisted mostly of a Mass in the scouts' chapel. When I had to be enrolled as part of my school duties, she asked that I be excused from the Mass; this was impossible for disciplinary reasons, but my mother saw to it that the chaplain and the commander were aware that I was not a Catholic and that I should not be asked to perform any external acts of devotion in church.
In short, I often found myself in situations different from others, looked on as if I were some strange animal. I do not think this harmed me: one gets used to persisting in one's habits, to finding oneself isolated for good reasons, to putting up with the discomfort that this causes, to finding the right way to hold on to positions which are not shared by the majority.
But above all I grew up tolerant of others' opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority's beliefs. And at the same time I have remained totally devoid of that taste for anticlericalism which is so common in those who are educated surrounded by religion.
I have insisted on setting down these memories because I see that many non-believing friends let their children have a religious education 'so as not to give them complexes', 'so that they don't feel different from the others.' I believe that this behavior displays a lack of courage which is totally damaging pedagogically. Why should a young child not begin to understand that you can face a small amount of discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea?
And in any case, who said that young people should not have complexes? Complexes arise through a natural attrition with the reality that surrounds us, and when you have complexes you try to overcome them. Life is in fact nothing but this triumphing over one's own complexes, without which the formation of a character and personality does not happen. "
― Italo Calvino , Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings
7
" It is not true what everyone always says that the only way to see America is to go across it by car. Apart from the fact that it is impossible given its enormous size, it is also deadly boring. A few outings on the motorway are enough to give an idea of what small-town and even village America is like on average, with the endless suburbs along the highways, a sight of desperate squalor, with all those low buildings, petrol stations or other shops which look like them, and the colours of the writing on the shop signs, and you realize 95 per cent of America is a country of ugliness, oppressiveness and sameness, in short of relentless monotony. "
― Italo Calvino , Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings
9
" In short, until the Second World War broke out, the world seemed to me to have a range of different gradations of morality and behaviour, not opposites but placed alongside each other. At one extreme was the stern anti-Fascist or even pre-Fascist rigour which was incarnated by my mother with her moralistic, secular, scientific, humanitarian, pacifist, animal-loving austerity (my father was another response on his own: a solitary walker, he lived more in the woods with his dogs than among other humans: hunting in season, and looking for mushrooms or snails in the other months). After that one gradually moved through various levels of indulgence towards human weakness, approximation and corruption which became more and more marked and cloying as one went through the Catholic, military, conformist and bourgeois vanity fairs, until you reached the opposite extreme of total vulgarity, ignorance and bluster which was Fascism in its smug sense of triumph, devoid of scruples and sure of itself. "
― Italo Calvino , Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings
16
" In defining my youthful ideas I used the terms anarchism and Communism. The first stands for the need for the truth about life to be developed in all its richness, over and above the deadening effect imposed on it by institutions. The second represents the need for the world’s richness not to be wasted but organized and made to bear fruit according to reason in the interests of all men living and to come.
The first term also means being ready to break the values that have become consolidated up until now, and that bear the mark of injustice, and to start again from scratch. The second also means being ready to run risks involved in the use of force and authority in order to reach a more rational stage in the shortest time possible.
These two terms or orders of needs and risks have been to varying degrees co-present in my way of considering political ideas and actions, in the years when I was part of the Communist party, just as they were before that and as they have remained since. Placing an emphasis on one or other of the two elements, or one or other of the two definitions I have given of each, has been the way in which I followed the historic experiences of these years.
Today my main concern is to see that the positive definition of the two terms, the one I gave first, can come true by paying the lowest possible of the costs I outlined in the second. The problems that are now troubling the world seem to me to be contained in this crux. "
― Italo Calvino , Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings
