Dino Buzzati
Il deserto dei Tartari

Sometimes it seems to me that life is nothing more than a routine interspersed with an almost endless series of dates. Dates in which we are accustomed to placing an increasing number of intoxicating expectations; it is sad but often the future takes on the shape of a mere mirage. If we see it from afar it seems like a fulfilling vision which, as we get closer, transforms and slips through our fingers like water brought to the mouth by an incautiously open hand. Still thirsty, we find nothing better than to scan the distant horizon in search of a new fulfilling vision on which to place our new fantasies full of renewed and energetic hope, heedless of the wonders of the present that pass by like landscapes from the window of a train. A continuous loop for a silly hamster that persists in running inside the wheel, convinced that by increasing the pace it will eventually manage to get out. This weekend in my city, temperatures reached 36-37 degrees Celsius. Innocent sculpted clouds and a blinding sun framed a sea of weekend projects among friends and acquaintances. Today (Saturday) it is raining, those long and hot afternoons with light until 10 PM are gone and I am sure that those same people will complain of the hostile weather as profoundly unfair over the weekend, forgetting that after work they could have spent splendid and refreshing hours. But the summer has just been born: we will make up for it gloriously, they will tell me, rubbing their hands at the mere intoxicating thought.

I haven't read any other books by Buzzati, but the melancholic beauty, the not at all gratifying philosophical message, the surreal description of atmospheres so well described (capable of finding far too concrete resonance in everyday life) is surprising and I think that one of these days I will go to the library to the shelf with the letter B.

Lieutenant Drogo is not at all convinced on his horseback journey that will finally take him to the Bastiani Fortress: leaving the city for such a remote and austere place to defend an apparently useless border does not attract him. But the boy, the noun preceding this faded engraving proves it, has youth on his side and takes this brief period as a bitter sip to swallow, like a necessary medicine with a distasteful flavor. But what are a handful of hours in the face of an entire life? And if these hours were to turn into scattered months, four, the perspective wouldn’t change much either. Thus he finds himself presiding over that border, learning the strictly observed passwords during guard shifts and scanning that ever-unchanging horizon. Life often follows these tracks. You take on a job you don't like, you do something reluctantly; with friends, you claim it’s just a temporary matter, but no matter how impossible it seems, in many of those cases gray hairs emerge and you've never moved.

Time, that bastard we have ridiculously tried to trap first in hourglasses, sundials, clocks, and who knows what else, is in no hurry and has the innate ability to camouflage itself in the gray folds of days too similar to one another. Thus one lives in the expectation of imminent change: happiness is always around the next bend, too bad the gas often runs out first.

Drogo begins to pick up those signals of invisible danger that the older officers, now dried up of hope and nonetheless condemned to remain at the fortress having reached the sunset of their lives, had launched at him inviting him to leave as soon as possible, away from that remote and useless hermitage. It is a very sharp book. Tomorrow, tomorrow and again tomorrow to procrastinate infinitely: this is how many existences with infinite potential are confined to a ridiculous handful of environments, schedules, and activities that are too defined and predictable. Buzzati’s is a cry against the standardization of thought, action, and living. It’s a powerful invective against time, but upon reflection, the object of his criticism isn’t so much the temporal measure as the reckless use we make of it. That of Buzzati’s "Desert of the Tartars" is a sort of "carpe diem" that fits perfectly even 70 years after its publication in the society of social networks and the pursuit of broader sharing at the expense of personal initiative and the pursuit of our desires, often repressed and unattempted until the grave.

It’s a book that invites us to tread different grounds so as not to regret a flat life that, on our deathbed, will otherwise appear to us like the smoky and blurred horizon of the north side of Bastiani Fortress. The Tartars will no longer come, or mockingly they will arrive when we are too old to rise and fight them. And so Captain Drogo, now close to death, is elegantly kicked out of the fortress finally in a state of war. It’s both a terrible and sublime description of those withered lips desperately trying to drink. Drogo for the last time sees the liquid he has pursued all his life mocking slip away from his fingers, closes his eyes because he knows there will be no more opportunities for him and thinks of how he could have wasted all these decades so absurdly. And he cannot find a satisfactory answer to ease the regret, because quite simply it doesn’t exist.