Riding a train is also a practice in loneliness. A loneliness similar to a brief rainshower in a hot August afternoon. I am on my way to Viareggio, a seaside town in Tuscany. One is afraid to take his loneliness too far for it might turn into a storm. Maybe writing is a kind of barrier against the flood of loneliness. Through the train window I glimpse a small farm land in which an old man is petting a lamb that sits at his feet. For a moment I desired fiercely to become that lamb.
In this small seaside town the light seems not to end, like an ongoing novel, and the people here don’t blink their eyes in the sun. People who live nearby the sea are as unintimidating as the orange trees that line the streets of this town. There is a gentleness and a lightheartedness in them that you rarely find in city people. They are more detached from the daily concerns of a busy everyday life; compared to city people who treat time as a dissatisfied and vindictive master with its greedy demands, for the seaside town people time is a collaborator, a co-conspirator in the struggle against exactitude, precision, repetition, and also reason. For this, they worry less, they take life as it comes. No wonder there are many open streets in the center of the town. There is always a sense of accommodation, a welcoming, everything is open like the sea. You can tell by the way they talk that they are incapable of holding a grudge but capable of becoming monstrously angry when the confines of their calm laziness are violated. Laziness understood as indifference shot through with kindness. It is a common, unfair allegation against the seaside town people. For these people “hard work” is a bleak joke.
I have embodied radical aimlessness up to the remote corners of my brain that I unsurprisingly step on a soft piece of fresh dog shit. I’ve learned this story a long long time ago. I am not disappointed. There are shit everywhere around us. There is no time. I have all the time in the world. I walk back towards the seashore again to brush the shit out of my shoe against the sand. I have all the time in the world.
My train leaves at 20:10. I still have more than an hour to spare. I walk into a café and order a cold glass of Spritz: a typical Tuscan cocktail made of prosecco, Aperol, and soda water. While sipping my drink a black Labrador stops beside me for two unflinching seconds. We stare at each other like two old men who have to make a final inventory of their lives until the dog is tugged by its master. I realize I saw in the dog’s eyes the look of a dead man whom I knew but whose face and name I cannot remember.
I intend to pass by a pizzeria before I leave this town.
Remember the times when we had to run like fugitives along the underpass towards the platform lest the train would miss us?
As I fix myself on the train seat by the window a vagabond walks through the cabin looking intense and agitated; he searches through under the train seats and approaches me with a Southern Italy accent, “See what I found? Two fucking euros man.” Something inside me is fraught with a feeling that if the vagabond dared to touch me I would have killed him right there and then. Probably by stabbing the pencil with which I’m writing this piece through his temple or eye socket. There lies a dormant barbarity in all of us.
I've been trying to figure out the nature of this August loneliness until I reencounter the words of the great, restless Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis:
“This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairytale.”
There are no rainshowers today as the weather forecast has predicted.