Essays
Personal reflections and thoughts on technology, work, and life.
The Selfish Heart
A few days ago I listened again, after years, to “La ballata dell’amore cieco (o della vanità)” by Fabrizio De André. If you grew up in Italy you know it by heart whether you wanted to or not; for everyone else, the story goes like this.
It happens at least one in the life of a man: he falls madly in love with a woman who does not care for him at all. She doesn’t want his love: she wants to see what it can be made to do. She challenge him: Bring me your mother’s heart, to feed my dogs, he does. Not enough. Then she asks for the blood in his veins, and he gives her that too. And while his life runs out, De André closes the scene on both of them and hands each one an ending. The man dies happy, still in love. The woman watches him die happy and is seized by dismay: nothing is left to her, not his love, not what he owned, only the dried blood of his veins.
Read EssayRituals in the modern era: from getting in shape to shaping your life
Bold title uh? Follow me carefully.
One evening, while I was training in the gym, as I’ve been doing for the past 20 years, a girl asked me if she was executing the exercise that her trainer added to her routine correctly: little did she know that experiencing the same scene once again would allow me to finally see and understand one particular pattern I had experienced all my life.
The Problem Solver
When something breaks, most people call someone, I don’t. I open it up. Not because I always know what’s wrong, but because I need to figure it out. And when I look at the problem, the feeling isn’t dread. It’s closer to relief. Finally, something with an answer.
There are plenty of people like this. The “problem solvers”, but that’s too clean a label for what’s actually going on.
Where it comes from
I think there are two roots, and most of us have some mix of both.
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