Dino Buzzati
Il deserto dei Tartari

(Tic. Tac.) I try to write, but I can't. I'm struggling. (Tic. Tac.) The ticking of my clock bothers me. (Tic. Tac.) A thought, out of nowhere, comes to me: funny how such a small device, created by an imperfect hand like that of man, is destined to mark something as precise and vast as the passing of time. Yes, time. Able to flow silently, like a small mountain stream - but with the power and impossibility to be stopped worthy of a flood. So discreet that we almost forget about it. Thinking it's infinite. And indeed, our thought is correct: it is infinite. Eternal. We are not. And so, often, we don't live intensely. We don't fully enjoy the day. We wait. So much so that minutes become hours. Then months. Then years. Often identical to one another. And one morning we look in the mirror and discover that time is indeed invisible, abstract, but on the skin, it has left something terribly concrete: the furrows of old age. And that our time has flown away, like a kite escaped from the hands of a clumsy child.

"Il deserto dei Tartari" is precisely about this. It narrates the life of Giovanni Drogo, a young soldier who has just become a lieutenant and is preparing to leave for his first official assignment: to serve at the Bastiani Fortress. The fort in question is situated at the edge of a plain where there is no human presence (Tartars’ desert), and it is isolated from the civilized world.

Constructed as the first barrier to stop the advance of enemy warriors from the desert, over time it has lost its importance: in fact, for years no hostile army has appeared on the horizon, and the structure has gradually been forgotten by the people of the kingdom. Completely forgotten. Here, however, soldiers still live, monitoring the plain in anticipation of possible attacks. Waiting. Drogo thus becomes one of them. Deciding to stay only a few months, the repetitiveness of the days, however, will take hold of him in the same way that a drop of water carves a groove in a rock: slowly. Very slowly. But in a devastating manner. The soldier will thus consume his own life within those abandoned walls waiting for nothing. For warriors who are not there. Who will never be there.

The years will start passing faster than a blink of an eye and, now trapped in that fortress for too many years, he will feel estranged from the outside world, so much so that he no longer returns to the city to visit his mother and the friends of the past, who have now grown up and forgotten about him. Fate, however, has a strange trick in store for Drogo: at the very moment when he will be too old to remain in service, thus retiring and having to leave the fortress, enemies will appear on the horizon, and the soldiers will finally be able to say they have not waited in vain. Except for him.

Dino Buzzati (1906 - 1972), defined by critics as "the Kafka of the Navigli", writes in 1945 "Il deserto dei Tartari" - a novel in which the underlying theme is the aforementioned one: postponing to an imaginary tomorrow what can be done today, and in which life's routine, the same day after day, is capable of inexorably consuming man's existence without him even realizing it.

Life is like a novel: each person writes one, different for each individual - but where the ending is the same for everyone. So make sure that the pages composing it are not faded photocopies, one identical to the other, but that they can tell a story: yours.