Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living, Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 126, from the entry of 10 December 1939:
Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours seem short and the years long.
A very sharp observation. Unfortunately, most of Pavese's diary is not at this level of objective insight. It is mostly self-therapy, a working though of his misery and maladjustment and self-loathing. For example,
And one can understand the innate, ravening loneliness in every man, seeing how the thought of another man consummating the act with a woman -- any woman -- becomes a nightmare, a disturbing awareness of a foul obscenity, an urge to stop him, or if possible destroy him. Can one really endure that another man -- any man -- should commit with any woman the act of shame? Noooo. Yet this is the central activity of life, beyond question. . . . However saintly we may be, it disgusts and offends us to know that another man is screwing. (p.64)
Has the poet come too much under the influence of Stile Nuovo? There is the tendency of romantics, and Italians are romantics, to put women on pedestals and make 'angels' of them. The thought of sexual intercourse, were it possible, with an angel or with a woman one has angelicized is admittedly repulsive.
Dark is the morning that passes without the light of your eyes.
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