Alessandro Bertirotti

Translation by Roberta Bertirotti

Lucio Anneo Seneca (4 a.C. - 65 d.C.), a reach family's son, cultured and a very good speaker, is the Nerone's  educator and in his capacity he exerts his influence on the Roma politics. Seneca proposes a task to himself: to transmit to Nerone his virtues in order to make them a model of wisdom. But he realizes very soon that Nerone is going to a monarchic absolutism and he decides on 62 A.D. to leave the political life. Seneca is disillusioned, because all him expectations for which he beats himself, are now disappointed, they are defeated by the reality's facts. He feels near to death more than ever, because the matters of the time and of the end are always with his philosophical reflection.
He writes that men waste their time on vain things and they become aware thinking how much the time is  precious only when the death is close to them. He writes too that to get ready for death it doesn't mean to renounce to live, cause only the idiots are afraid of death since it is the end of every human pain. On the contrary, he arrives to uphold that when the sage will no be able to practise the virtue anymore, owing to  the time hostility, he will have to understand that the time to regain his freedom by the extreme act of suicide, which is completely in possession of all his faculties.
Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827) has a similar to Seneca death's point of view. In the epistolary Romance "The latest letters of Iacopo Ortis", a story of a young patriot that, at coming to nothing of his dreams is driven to love and politic desperation, and sees in death the only way out of his negative situation. In the sonnet "In the evening", the concept of the "nothing eternal" is central. The death has got a liberating efficacy because it represents the total abatement where conflicts and sufferings are cancelled. In the sonnet "In the Death of brother Giovanni" the vision of the death changes, because it becomes important the grave's reason. It identifies itself with the family nucleus' imagine that is particularly re-established by the figure of the mother which talks about her faraway brother to her son on his grave. The poet hopes to come back one day and be able to finally cry on the grave of the young broken life of his brother. He only asks that after the death his body is given back to his mother. So the death becomes the unique way to realise the rejoining with the family nucleus which seems impossible and definitely denied. In this sonnet the death isn't the nothing eternal anymore, because it has now become lamented permitting a connection with the life. In the "Sepulchres" too , Foscolo takes again the concept; he initially insists on the death's materialistic thesis, but he goes over it after,  by other considerations which deny it as the nothing eternal. On the philosophical level, Foscolo declares a survival illusion after the death, which is granted by the grave preserving the dead person's memory with living persons. On the Foscolo point of view, the grave assumes a fundamental value in the human civilization, because it becomes the family affections' centre and it becomes the guarantee of their duration after the death. Ortis ends with the protagonist's suicide, but now Foscolo, by the illusion, gets to affirm the central role of the close bonds of affection. Giacomo Leopardi too, he turns his attention to the death. In the "Canticle of the sylvan cock" he writes that the being of things has an unique purpose: the death... because the nature is intent on the death in its every action.

In every daily activity the time is the first thing we worry about, because it allows us to forget. It's the time that heals up our wounds, if only apparently, and it is the time that dispels our frustration and anguish. Since we are trapped inside the time, how can we reach the condition where there is no contradictions and where every single movement of the life is an integrated action, where the daily life becomes the coveted reality? We should maybe to act an incredible change, not only in a superficial level, of our external activities, but in the internal level too, into the deep. We should give birth to an internal revolution so that to transform our way of thinking until to produce a life style such as to be in itself a total action. But, if we could do it, we wouldn't be able to make this sort of personal revolution, because we are timorous.

Everything we say we are, Buddhists, Hinduists, Christians or something else, however we are shaped by the past, by our habits and traditions. We are avidity, envy, joy, pleasure, the beautiful enjoyment , we are anguish of not to be loved, of not to be able to realise ourselves. We are all that, that's to say we are a process inside the continuity. And all that, we cough it both by useful and negative modalities in the same time: we are linked up with our opinions, with our way of thinking. In short, we are fastened to a method that we consider as winning, without weighing its real efficacy every time we use it. 

we look more carefully at the methodological contradiction where the western thinking moves, especially when we are in front of a conviction of a limited and separatistic knowledge. Giuliana Mieli, psychotherapist and a dear friend of mine, says: "the love is the symptom of our limit, because if we were perfect, we wouldn't look for love". We don't need it, and we have no desire, we add. The love sense, as a highly significant relation among every living being, animals and not, it isn't a mental process inside the continuity. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to justify, to understand our frailties and the other people's one. We wouldn't be able to be patient and to wait for a better moment, for ourselves and for other people, and always after the actual one.

Without the love the whole humanity couldn't cognitively project any type of future, because we really efficaciously know only what we love. And perhaps in this limit's consciousness, thanks to it we always look for someone completing the feeling of belonging to everything, there is the human consciousness' big power. Thanks to it, our "to be grub" today becomes the possibility to be born again, tomorrow, as butterflies in our sons.