A year ago you left us, I hoped that your words, our reasoning would keep me company in moments of greatest despair and loneliness, but instead they did nothing but strengthen the awareness of how alone I was and orphaned of a special friend, who bestowed with generosity, beauty, wisdom and smiles; I miss your fruitful, disarming, cheerful, compelling speech, never boring or frivolous, your irony and self-irony that gave no concessions to anyone, least of all yourself, the concrete lightness with which you beat up life, fate and imbeciles of every race and color, your pietas, disguised as false cynicism, capable of shedding new light on banal everyday life, your intellectual honesty, your ability to give body, consistency to what wanders around, gets tangled up in the parts of the soul , the surges of speed and spirit, typical of wise conversationalists, lovers of words, especially those that derive from a great and long journey. There is no state in this community that does not always remember and celebrate its best children, wrapped up in life like you, happily attracted also by the simplicity of things of which you had a profound awareness. You have lived countless lives, you have been many different things, often at war with each other, but most of all you have been faithful to your inner image, to your feelings, to the totality of your emotions and your memories. You were a serial dreamer, but also a man of action, concrete, solid and perhaps too alone. The dream, every now and then, gave way to reality, but then it hurried to recover its path and time, and here began the interminable overtime. Thank you for having monitored the time of all of us and its ephemeral promises, for having loved unconditionally the life, for having gone through wind and storms without ceasing to look for the world elsewhere, capable of still feeding on imagination, emotions and desires that cannot be tamed, thank you for having loved, cradled, my poetry as if it were a creature, in need of warmth and nourishment, for having banished from your vocabulary words such as renunciation, silence, resignation, for having spread liberally what you knew, loved and perhaps feared. We are earth and seeds, roots and wind, a lump of imagined lives, tireless suitors of an infinity that does not give peace.
Marquez wrote: life is not the one lived, but the one one remembers and how one remembers it in order to tell it.
Without memory, without memory we would be nothing.
Enza Berardone
