Francesco Pullia’s book is an interesting and complex text, intensely rooted in the author’s own existence. It is run through by a continual need to confront and to understand losses and separations, to work through griefs – some of them for the death of animals (cats, dogs, and so on) with whom Pullia lives or has long lived –. Again and again the text returns to the telling of pain, of loss and therefore of separation from someone who has been loved, who has filled the days, the life, with affection, only to leave, afterwards, emptiness, absence. The losses concern not only the beloved household animals but also family members, in particular the parents (the pages devoted to his father and mother are, to my mind, the most moving). After this preamble, I pass to what stands out as the book’s second leitmotif, namely the question of how one can defend oneself against this feeling of loss, of how the painful experiences, the losses of life and of love, may be soothed. Pullia has an answer that runs through almost every page: with pity and compassion towards all living creatures. Pain draws meaning (and perhaps pacification) from a deep empathy, that is, when one keeps within one’s inner life the memory of the love lived with all living beings and among all living beings. Proceeding in scattered order, I asked myself where, in ancient times, the roots of this tenderness lay, of this love of the author for the creatures with whom he has lived. I asked myself, in short, whether there existed a place, a time, an origin, a lived experience out of which this intense identification-empathy with the pain of the other had been generated. Certainly one of the interpretative keys (the most immediate) is to be found in the philosophy of life that the author has developed over his existence: the Buddhist and/or Jain one (nonviolence), matured in the course of a personal quest. Searching, in Pullia’s life experience, for the roots of a certain way of thinking-feeling in an emotional key, I came upon the account of his suffering for the cat Teo, who falls ill and goes blind. At this point the author gives us a key for understanding the ancient and deep dynamic of what he calls his capacity for identification. In short: to seek the ancient origin of a tendency to identify with the suffering of others, to seek and to find an empathy that translates, over time, into pity. One key lies in the affair of the diabetic grandmother’s blindness. The author recalls that as an adolescent he wondered what blindness was, and answers that it is “perhaps a kind of knowledge of the mind’s deepest mysteries”; and he also recalls that as a child he would blindfold himself “to seek an intimate and symbolic relationship with the dark, with the night”. As an adolescent he wanted, in his own way, to take part in his diabetic grandmother’s blindness, to feel that pain, that hurt, and to contain it within himself, seeking understanding but above all compassion for the suffering of the one beside him. His pain for the blind Teo perhaps sinks down into these roots. I should like to make an observation, I am not sure how pertinent. Teo, now blind and ill, together with the little cat Kitty, is a survivor. In the author’s house absence dwells and hovers; the other cats have all died over time and are buried in the garden among rosemary and jasmine plants. Suddenly, a mysterious, tender empathy towards them surfaces in the author: “every gust of wind speaks of them, every ray brings back their gaze, their tenderness” (p. 35). The pain of loss seems tempered by the breath of nature within which the cats now gone go on living, mysterious and sharing presences. Everything is joined, breathes together: the wind, the sun, the earth, the cats. There is a kind of intense listening to living nature in which nothing truly goes out, nothing dies; everything is transformed and speaks, says something. It is only a matter of knowing how to listen. I want to add now, in this free wandering through the writing of Francesco Pullia, something about the death of the parents as he tells it. Particularly moving are the pages that call up his mother. Francesco’s mother, in dying, stirs in her son distant memories, childhood, an intense belonging to the home, to the family rites of Christmas. I will not enter into the story so intensely told. I will only say that the pages in which the memories of childhood (and of the parents) emerge are those in which the writing becomes richer, more “narrative”. The affectionate memory of past events is a founding part of the inner reflection-reparation; it is an emotion that nourishes. And now a few notes on the accounts of journeys in India, more precisely among the Tibetan Himalayan peoples. In them one finds contents present throughout the book and on which I have dwelt earlier. Indeed, in these places of the spirit the author seeks the roots of his religious need. But above all, once again, he means to understand certain themes, certain questions about life that he has felt and lived in a pressing way: separation, absence, death, the leave-taking of the living from the dead. Here I will touch on only a brief fragment. In the account of one of these journeys we witness the unfolding of a Tibetan funeral (p. 170). From a house, all of a sudden, the author recounts, come sounds and the chanting of litanies. They are ritual songs that accompany the funeral vigil. Francesco draws near to the place. The relatives of the deceased eat sweets and drink tea, serene. They catch sight of him on the threshold of the little house, invite him in, embrace him, embrace him, a foreign passer-by, a stranger. Death and mourning are celebrated by means of a collective, affectionate, familial rite that makes the pain acceptable, bearable. Francesco, at this point, weeps and thinks back to his father, to his end, to the mourning, to a serene acceptance of pain. The event that took place in the far-off Himalayan village is set, in the book, against the solitude of the world in which we Westerners live. The author’s feeling and experience lie precisely here: in pity, in compassion, in empathy for every living being, in closeness to those who suffer, in a true acceptance of life and, in this, in the soothing of the pain of living. I regard the experience of pain as a reality ontologically, originally rooted in every human being: a kind of original status (not solely and not exclusively, of course). I hold that every soothing of pain is an experience that is built up over the course of growth, of maturation, thanks to the truth and inwardness of the human bonds (of love, of trust) that nourish and sustain us, that make us “be!”, that tell us what life is: a fabric of deep relationships in which we feel loved, are capable of loving, and become individuals as subjects. As I move towards the conclusion, I make a brief reference to the myth of the androgyne, to which a chapter is devoted. Much has been said of the theme of pain-separation, so present in Pullia’s writing, of the suffering for absence, of the search for pity-compassion. It is as though the author were seeking (at least in a significant part of his mind) a kind of original wholeness. He evokes, at this point, the “myth of the androgyne” precisely as the myth of the original undivided, and asks whether the shattered unity can ever be recomposed. I think (it is my opinion) that the myth of the androgyne has something un-liberating and decidedly confusing about it. I think that when the androgyne separates into two sexes, into two distinct entities, it finds in separation the principle of the distinction-individuation from which is born the encounter (the dialogue) with and among the different, and therefore the growth of one’s own self, differentiated and autonomous, precisely inasmuch as separate. It seems to me one may say that, in order to be unity in this (and in another) existence, we must all be different and communicating. One does not unite in indistinctness; rather, one surely communicates through the vital necessity of separating creatively, each finding unity with his own different language. The very psychological category of empathy is like a “putting oneself in the other’s shoes”, containing him within one’s own mind and, at the same time, remaining oneself, different, distinct. Without distinction there is no understanding. A final note: from the literary point of view, the writing of Francesco Pullia is to be admired; it is limpid, wholly readable. It is a writing in which narrations and illuminations alternate. In it I have sensed the presence of poetry, of a familiarity with poetry that lends elegance and richness to the words, to the book.

(Francesco Pullia, Dal greto del fiume, Afterword by Giuseppe Moscati, Mimesis, Milan 2017, pp. 216, € 18,00)