"Tullio had resumed talking about his illness, which was also his chief hobby. He had studied the anatomy of the leg and the foot. Laughing, he told me that when one walks at a rapid pace, the time in which a step is taken does not exceed a half-second, and that in that half-second no fewer than fifty-four muscles are engaged. I reacted with a start, and my thoughts immediately rushed to my legs, to seek this monstrous machinery. I believe I found it. Naturally I didn't identify the fifty-four moving parts, but rather an enormous complication went to pieces the moment I intruded my attention upon it. I limped, leaving that café, and I went on limping for several days. For me, walking had become hard labor, also slightly painful. That jungle of cogs now seemed to lack oil, and in moving, they damaged one another reciprocally. A few days afterwards, I was assailed by a more serious illness, of which I will speak, that diminished the first. But even today, as I write about it, if someone watches me when I move, the fifty-four muscles become self-conscious and I risk falling." [105]
"What's definitive is always calm, because it is detached from time." [97]
"I pursued many women in my life, and many of them also allowed themselves to be overtaken. In my dreams I captured them all. Naturally I don't beautify them by changing their features, but I act like a friend of mine, a very refined painter who, when he portrays beautiful women, thinks intensely also of some other beautiful thing, for example of a piece of lovely porcelain. A dangerous dream, because it can endow the dreamed-of woman with new power and, when seen again in the light of reality, they retain something of the fruits and flowers and porcelain with which they were clad." [81]
"Without being an orator, I suffered from the disease of words. Words for me had to be an event in themselves and therefore could not be imprisoned in any other event." [76]
"The most intense life is narrated, in synthesis, by the most rudimentary sound, that of the sea-wave, which, once formed, changes at every instant until it dies!" [61]
"In the mind of a young man from a middle-class family, the concept of human life is associated with that of a career, and in early youth the career is that of Napoleon I." [61]
"The doctor is a power when he is at a sick man's bedside." [51]
"He looked around as if he sought outside himself whatever he was unable to grasp within." [41]
"The sick animal will not allow himself to be observed at any orifice through which disease or weakness can be perceived." [39]
"My yearning for health had driven me to study the human body. He, on the contrary, had been able to dispel from his memory any thought of that frightful machine. For him the heart did not beat and there was no need to recall valves and veins and metabolism, to explain how his organism lived." [34]
"Now that I am growing old and turning into a kind of patriarch, I also feel that a preached immorality is more to be punished than an immoral action. You arrive at murder through love or through hate; you propagandize murder only through wickedness." [34]
"I spoke sincerely, as in Confession: a woman never appeals to me as a whole, but rather ... in pieces! In all women I loved feet, if well shod: in many others, a slender neck but also a thick one, and the bosom, if not too heavy. I went on listing female anatomical parts, but the doctor interrupted me. "These parts add up to a whole woman."" [16]
La conscienza di Zeno
Italo Svevo
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