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It’s The Smallness of The Dream
It was eight o’clock in the evening in Rome. I was wandering along Via Labicana looking for nothing. It was forty degrees in the shade and the humidity had set to a severe 94 percent, but the heat wasn’t my problem. Because at seventy-seven years old just two hours ago, the problem was that I had discovered, by precise and unmistakable ways, the meaning of the word incubation.
I was alone, but loneliness was never my problem. I was old, but old age was never my problem. I was just torn apart by the absence. I have to say this. The absence of love. Like a sixteen year old. But without the self-pity, victimistic power typical of a 16-year-old in love deficit. That resource there, memorable, voracious, very powerful, does not belong to adult men.
Lately, the absence of love loses its dreamy and romantic knots and becomes concrete, realistic, objective. So unbearable. Romance still aligns somewhere, but it tends to remember, and the awareness of your own littleness prevents you from hoping to find romance again in the future. It’s not the old age that limits the dream, it’s the smallness of the dream…
— Paolo Sorrentino
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What is that missing thing? We all feel it, that lack, that shortfall of satisfaction, that little disappointment at the end of the day — what is that? Living as if love…
