La montagna
Esistere in montagna

LA RECENSIONE

The mountain

The mountain is a hostile place, inhospitable for existence, unless you belong to the family of goat-like bovids and are equipped with omasum, abomasum, rumen, and reticulum.

Or you have to be a horsefly.

Thus, being a creature perfectly capable of climbing and grazing, or a parasite adapted to feed off the thick cuticle of these climbing, shrub-eating mammals.

In winter, it snows and avalanches tumble down, overwhelming swarms of humans in fashionable suits with expensive foot prosthetics designed to romp down the slopes until they slip and break their limbs.

Then the rescue helicopter arrives, with further risks for the community.

In summer, the elderly set off eagerly on sunny hikes that often end in collective suicides off the cliffs.

That is, if a viper doesn't bite their alien, anemic ankles.

Those who reach the top and survive enjoy a beautiful landscape, but must then descend before frostbite necrosis or sudden weather fury catches them off guard.

All clear signs of a deep incompatibility between the human race and such places.

Some reckless individuals settle in communities dedicated to shepherding and the production of small cheeses, with dramatic outcomes and mutations that are evident to all.

The locals indeed express themselves with mostly guttural sounds, adopting cadences (perhaps due to the ancient affiliation with cows and goats) and frequencies unbearable to the human ear.

Due to depression, they ultimately turn to alcohol, while whole generations of youths entrust their existential discomfort to mechanical means, crashing their motorcycles along the winding roads of the area.

Sometimes, it even happens that your father-in-law, afflicted by orobic migration at the weekend, swallows one of these under-aged cheeses.

Then he asks for a car ride and, in the cramped cabin, begins to talk and talk and talk, exhaling such pestilent vapors that soon saturate the environment.

In the brief span of a few seconds, the small car becomes more like a room in Auschwitz, and the damage to olfactory receptors is irreversible.

On the other hand, it is understandable.

When the gaze cannot turn beyond impassable walls of millennia-old stone, the thought can never soar.