ANDexperienced in pages on feelings and their asymmetries, and with botanical expertise, Antonio Pascale, born in Caserta and Roman by adoption, returns to the bookstore with a new collection of short stories entitled The fig leaf (Einaudi): 10 heart-pounding stories with which he confronts trees, women and men. In other words, how from scientific necessity, to which nature adheres, we pass to complexity – a complicated simplicity – when the mind and heart beat asynchronously. It tells of a man who lives the more he forgets, the more he desires, the more he gets down, the more he reads and learns, the more confused he finds himself: a bit like everyone else. This is why he looks for points of orientation and, unlike many, he turns to plants. After all, they have been here long before us and they will be the last to die, they contain thousand-year symbols, they are able to defy adversity and therefore offer us a model of resistance. By mixing autobiography and fiction and making the characters rotate around the pivot of an ego that portrays the author, the book unfolds a journey into childhood, over time, with women, who with exact lines gives us a mirror of the present time and the times of a life.
Antonio Pascale is a writer, essayist, theater and television author. He has published, among others, The maintenance of the affections, The attenuanti sentimentali and The aggravanti sentimentali. © Grazia Ippolito / rosebud2
There FIG leaf, literally and as a metaphor. Why this title?
A way of saying, covering shame with the fig leaf. But those alleged shame are nothing more than elements of the human condition, we want to know, we desire, we stumble, we fall, we find ourselves naked, we try to get up, we work hard, we tell stories to motivate us, and maybe they are not real. So, in this case, the fig leaf is a tool for investigating, not hiding. The question is: why do we have such fragile, sometimes unfortunate and useless bodies and why do we like them so much?
Continuing with the subtitle: Stories of trees, women, men. Nice to see these three categories lined up on the same level. Is the order of the poster alphabetical or is there a sense?
In order of appearance I would say. In short, human beings have attributed to plants elementary and ambivalent and often conflicting symbols, therefore the cherry tree is desire but also possession, the cactus carries with it the idea of resistance and adaptability but also of loneliness and so on. Plants invite us to take the whole package, to think about the dynamics that underpin our actions and the continuous conflicts they generate. The idea of the book is this, in a complicated world we use plants as compasses, that is, we think about some cardinal points, desire, love, time, memory. The cactus, the beech, the pine, the cherry tree, the lime tree… Each story starts from a plant, from a theme and develops it by telling stories of women and men.
The fig leaf by Antonio Pascale Einaudi pp. 296, euro 19.
You are also a science writer and expert in botany. What did the plants teach you? What do they have to teach us in general?
I am a writer, and then I deal with scientific dissemination, for the charm of certain disciplines (we only think of Darwinian theory or the wonder of the cell or the universe), and because today knowledge requires many tools but also the ability to integrate knowledge. Returning to the question, it is very simple: unfortunately we are blind to plants, in the sense that for evolutionary reasons we have concentrated on the prey, in short, things that were moving. Yet without plants we won’t even stand here wondering about who we are. And then they give relief, which is also an important aspect. The book aims to eliminate this blindness.
Ten tales named after ten trees that sprout ten human stories, in which what is clear and simple in nature becomes complicated. Are we the out of tune of creation?
The dilemma we face today: is this world the fruit of our best dreams or is it a nightmare? Anyone who says it’s a nightmare, like certain ecological currents, too many people, too much impact, too much CO2, we will crash. Those who say instead that it is a dream, a world free from hunger, disease and wars, and then who said that if we had continued with the lifestyle we had before the agricultural revolution or, subsequently, before the industrial revolution then will we not have suffered a collapse? I would say that our story tells the passage from Pinocchio (the story of hunger) to Masterchef (the story of abundance). Since we want to live we dream and our dreams also produce nightmares, but from nightmares we can learn to live better. Better to think with more data than to focus on just a few. The narrative also serves this purpose, to create conflicts, often without immediate response.
She is an expert on feelings, according to previous books. Do you think it would be desirable today, after these two extraordinary years, a maturity of feeling?
In our own way, we are all experts in feelings. But love as we think of it today (independence, strength, ability to choose) is a recent concept, so we still have to learn it. Let’s say that it begins with the desire to be loved and should end with loving. But it’s difficult, and the two things influence each other a lot and get confused. We are attracted to what is familiar (being loved), but what is familiar could be harmful (maybe there was a dysfunctional family) and we should transform the familiar into the wonderful, here understood as the capacity to marvel, be amazed, regain a full gaze. of grace. But this is the theory, for the practice there is the narrative, which wonders, why did we cover all this with a fig leaf?
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