Sgarbe to Ety; Letter one

Dear friend Ety, I write with a broken heart. A few hours ago, I took care to shut the mouth of impulse when you asked me: “What is happiness?” Any answer seems to be, by sheer necessity of language, of the word, a sadness in itself and, therefore, a kind of contradiction to the question. I like the idea that materialized princes become less able to govern us — an idea stolen from French literature when it dared to classify the Persians. We are, these days, with heat outside the body.

The glass is a problem for some close friends. Endless drinking sprees end almost invariably in rudeness sown at random, and work for those around — gathering disaffections, shards and half-empty bottles. This is consuming me — because I would not like to see people who could be saved destroying their own bodies and, along with it, all the relationships directly or indirectly tied to that body. I thought, about their self-destruction, of the word “perfidious,” because they prefer to bring themselves down rather than simply let themselves stand.

Goodbye.