WHO IS THE MOST SELF-CONFIDENT PERSON YOU KNOW?

A dialect poet from Reggio Calabria comes to mind: Nicola Giunta, who in everyday life worked as the director of the municipal library in my city.

He was a left-wing anarchist who lived through the years of the Second World War. Today he is gone. He authored a few books and left behind a sentence that perfectly captures the character of the people of my city:

“Come down here and do it yourself.”

A way of saying that anyone who judges what others do should first try doing it themselves. Because, in words, everything always seems easy.

People also used to tell a story about him.

When fascists stopped him in the street and forced him to drink a purgative to humiliate him, he would answer calmly:

“Go ahead and clean the body, but the spirit remains the same.”

He was never afraid to say what he thought.
But he did it in his own way.

He also said something that stayed with me:

Running away from danger is not cowardice.
Sometimes it is simply intelligence and common sense. Because facing everything head-on is not always courage; sometimes it is just a lack of clarity.

I have met many self-confident people, but only at certain moments of their lives.

This is the human condition: a creature that rarely possesses absolute certainty about its own actions.

Yet there is one certainty that remains true:

the time limit of the life we are living.

We do not always know what we will do.
We only know that the time available to us is not infinite.

And, with the irony of life, I too thought I had become first a writer, then an author, and then a publisher.

In the end I discover that I am simply
a digital librarian of a civilization on the web.

Nando

“The only place in the world where you can walk down the street and know what people are cooking inside their homes.”