Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Viaggio al Termine Della Notte

Freeing oneself from one's demons is everything in 'this life. Really. I truly pity those people who keep them inside, it is neither good nor right; you end up lying halfway through life, on the streets, anywhere. Someone will say, it doesn't matter, a person's values are something else, I lay the cards on the table, sip a bit of aged red and respond that only those who have the courage to see things as they truly are deserve respect—mine and others', whatever it may be. I've always liked dreamers, the damned, poets, spirits, whatever you want to call them, detached from reality but always ready to return, those who didn't live solely on clouds, a Baudelaire, the Great Charles, my first love born from deep nights when I would sit immersed in darkness thinking about Her and only Her, those thoughts that grip the spirit like nothing else and it seems like you are watching your existence hang miserably from a frayed string gradually breaking, like a film… continuous hallucinations, choices made on the spur of the moment, between one count and another, because the French grandpa was right, man doesn't stay honest for long when he is alone.

Lies, often condemned, whether small, innocent, or grievous, have never hurt me. Miserable as I am too, yet human, and it's not hope but a certainty. That then, to be human, you don't really need much. But a love for life, even while despising its sometimes damnably wrong contents, that, yes, always and anyway. Because the greatest soul is the one that, after words cold as stone but still real, manages, without doing so openly, to show you that in the end, love is everything. Like alcohol, yes, the more you are drunk, the more you are sure of yourself. But in the end, it shouldn't always boil down to the banal "make love, not war," superficial bullshit like this finds no fertile ground in the garden, my garden, the mental one. Everyone has their chest box hidden in the brain, and we all fill it, and use it, some more, some less. Well, if it's true that Sarkozy reads Céline, that's fine by me, but it surprises me, I don't want to talk politics. Especially not that of France.

The figure of Churchill enrages me. All his dime-store aphorisms, when he never even faced the beaches of Normandy and still talks about courage. I showed my folks that courage is nothing, really: it’s ordinary gestures dressed by ornaments taken directly from the Baroque, with a thousand and one lights stolen from the sky and fixed upon themselves. A total nothing. I despise the brave, nowadays, because being brave shouldn’t be considered an "example to follow," but "normal routine," if we want to define it a value, courage. And then, I feel compassion and sympathy for all those soldiers who died in the two Great Wars. Indeed. I’ve even cried over it, in my youth, when I used to read books on the subject. But that’s not it, the worst is the photos from the era. All smiling, the soldiers. The day after, they were ash in the wind, a nothing. We never remember the victims, but the survivors, to be hailed as Heroes forever, and those who lost their blood completely, bullets wasted, yet decisive. Decisive, and forgotten.

In the end, in the meanders, in my meanders, and in dreams, I have always been a pathetic loser sipping water sitting at a wooden table reading Voyage and looking pensively at the limits of my city, and in summer, the joy of being able to close my eyes and imagine Céline's colonial Africa, once I even cried over it, go figure. I had read Proust, it was the utmost... then I read Sartre, it disgusted me, it wasn’t stuff I felt was mine... Céline arrived, his prose tasting of lava, thrusting into your brain the smell of bodies slaughtered across the Flanders, the complicity of silence in nights searching for missing companions, how much I must’ve laughed at the jabs directed at that swine Pinçon?

Patriotism is bullshit. The State invents an excuse to justify continuous bloodshed, the evil is that you start believing it!

Today's society is summed up like this - we criticize crap, because it is very easy to measure ourselves against it, it makes us feel better, when we might be worth even less! This constructed world I don't feel is mine, I want to sniff, discover, feel all the waters crashing into a single bed of a single river to shake even the leaves, all these phone-killer gadgets, this technology, hell no, if it were up to me, I would’ve been born a thousand years ago. Yet, Céline makes you crawl at his feet, burns like coal, his prose reeks, scratches, melts, and yet smells of all the scents of the world, like flowers, a whole meadow... everything. You only need imagination, as he himself says. Without it, we are nothing!

"When we're on the brink of the abyss, we shouldn’t play it sly, but neither should we forget, we must tell it all without changing a word, the most disgusting thing we've seen in humans and then kick the bucket and then sink. As a job, there will be enough for a lifetime."