The moment I step into my double room — having walked the darkened passages that had once been hospital corridors, corridors through which the sick, who only weeks before had been holding stimulating conversations in the cloister, arm in arm beneath the arcades and discoursing on Neoplatonism, the mystics and the Waldensians, now, after their hospitalisation, walking arm in arm with their loved ones instead and, in reverent hope, seeking the doctors’ glances so as to sway their own fate through dozens of devout gestures and expressions, mutely performed their endless, painstaking labour of suffering; having contemplated those corridors, now emptied of every patient and decorated with photographs of the Holy Father and of laughing children, with Lourdes water and figures of St Francis — I can breathe the air one can breathe only in hospitals and in monasteries; the air one breathes in childhood, taken alone by one’s mother to a boarding school long before all the others will arrive, and later in the barracks, in a kind of Utopos or Eutopos that no longer holds anything to remind one, in a strange land, of what is one’s own; in those endless moments before one opens the window and the old light illumines the cross and the figure of the Virgin, one can breathe generations of solitude: there is a pneuma one awaits, for which one prepares and which one cultivates, singing soft hymns each day and praying each hour; and there is another that reaches one wholly without warning, filling the lungs with all the heaviness of earth and the weight of the world, letting the one who breathes it feel, for a single instant, all the suffering and all the beauty of the world.
Spoleto, Umbria, 1 September 2023
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