The Outsider. The life of a solipsist who dreams of freedom

In an interview with Charlie Rose, George Carlin says he has given up on having any illusions about humankind: “I love people one by one; people are marvellous if you take them as individuals – you can see the whole universe in their eyes – but as soon as they start to group together, to coalesce, when there are five or ten of them, they start to change; they sacrifice the beauty of the individual for the sake of the group.”

Perhaps this is even going too far, in the sense that it gives too much credit to individual human beings: if you look them in the eye, you don’t very often find ‘the entire universe’ there; for the most part, you find nothing at all. But yes, at a certain age you realise that individuals (one, two, three – not much more) are better than groups of tens, and that in joining forces – even for noble causes – there is almost always something suspicious or sinister. Is this down to the first strong impressions of childhood and youth?

Their lives were marked by affiliations with communities they had never actively chosen to join. They had simply found themselves there. They had sworn their first vow of fidelity to one another when they married, but it had not been a genuine choice, because even in that vow they had found themselves without fully understanding what they were doing. It was simply not an option not to marry, in the mid-twentieth century, for members of their social class; and since it was no longer the parents who decided whom one would marry, the role of the parents in their case had been played by the small company where both of them had (as it happened) found themselves working. According to the family legend—recounted by my mother with a candour that still moves me—the office manager had seen them together one day at the bar of a café and had remarked, ‘Why don’t you two get married? You make such a lovely couple.’ And they, thoughtlessly, had taken his advice.

In the mid-20th century, it was simply not an option for members of their social class not to have children, and so they had two, spaced out at just the right intervals. Upon becoming a family, the couple found themselves obliged to fulfil a series of social duties for which they had no inclination. At lunches and dinners with the extended family (aunts, cousins, grandparents), nobody liked anybody else; everyone approached these gatherings with a sense of dread and pre-emptive irritation, an irritation that would easily erupt right in the middle of the Event because of a brusque reply, an old grudge, a word spoken out of turn, or even simply because – as I was beginning to realise – when ten to twelve people with no experience of the world gather in the same space, something unpleasant inevitably happens that will spoil everyone’s life for days to come.

In fact, this is how I remember my life as a young boy: a long, gruelling emotional recovery following the scenes I had witnessed or in which I had been involved as the protagonist-victim during a Christmas lunch, a First Communion, or an Easter Monday outing. But no one was so free-thinking as to believe that, to avoid such scenes, it would be enough simply to eliminate the occasions that triggered them – that it would be enough simply to stop seeing one another. It was as if everyone had internalised Kafka’s maxim: ‘It is pointless to shut yourself away at home: you are already in theirs.’ Only later would I learn that, in reality, one could very well shut oneself away at home: but at that time, in that environment, the pull of customs, of the ‘things one must do’, was too powerful, and each time it drew us out. (I would also come to understand something even greater, namely that growing up means, amongst other things, freeing oneself from the agreements that others had drawn up for us before we had reached the age of reason: and this gave rise to an almost sacred notion in my mind of a child’s right to be left in peace, and as I’ve grown older, I’ve found coercion increasingly intolerable – even the loving coercion exerted on those not yet old enough to understand or react – across a vast spectrum ranging from the children I once saw marching in soldiers’ uniforms along the seafront at Los Roques, Venezuela, to the children taken into the centre of Rome to demonstrate for good causes or against bad ones. This is a form of involuntary affiliation from which, fortunately, having grown up in an apolitical environment, I was spared).

As I observed this unhappy couple who had produced an unhappy family, I must have sensed – even before I realised it – that the couple/family was the first community from which one should escape, and that any anguish endured in solitude was preferable to a life as a couple that had every chance of being, or becoming, distressing.

Beyond the extended family lay the vast world of social relations: not so vast, in reality, but that is how it seemed to us from our micro-middle-class vantage point. The children had to be taken to school, on school trips, to catechism, to Mass, to swimming lessons, to the stadium; We had to pay courtesy calls on acquaintances, be well-mannered guests, learn good manners, correct bad ones, and sit demurely in the dining room of a middle-aged stranger with purple hair whilst outside, under the May sun, an entire generation was indulging in petting. That was the job of parents – which, in those days, meant above all the job of a mother – and it gave rise to yet another endless series of frictions and grievances. My father had no interest in other human beings; no one had ever taught him otherwise; my mother was afraid of them (of people, but also of my father): any interaction could turn into a traumatic experience. That is why we tried to interact with people we knew, however much we despised them: relatives, neighbours on the same landing, certain ‘family friends’ whose lives, opinions and fears we knew next to nothing about, and wanted to know nothing about.

Perhaps that is why what, in theory, should have been pleasures for me – satisfactions of the body, mind or soul – became occasions of suffering. Or perhaps hell really was other people: the teachers, frustrated by a job they clearly did not want to do; the priests and nuns with their senseless, mortuary-like rituals; the black-and-white-clad supporters pitted against the maroon-clad supporters, those monsters of vanity that were the student representatives (we didn’t even like going to school: was there really anyone prepared to devote further hours of their time to it, just to ‘take part in the decision-making process’? There were, there were), schoolmates, catechism classmates or sports mates with their idiotic chatter about absolutely anything (and good heavens, their inability to keep from saying whatever popped into their heads, as if they were oblivious to even the possibility of an inner life that wasn’t verbalised: forty years later, I’ve found this very same flaw among the members of my gym in Turin, especially early in the morning during the calisthenics classes: even in Eden there are snakes).

It is clear enough: their affiliations – my parents had inherited them from their own parents, and so on, going back, if not indefinitely, to that remote era when we lived like sheep in the meadows. All innocent, then, but in order to survive I had to break the chain (“And there is no blade that can sever / the languid chain / generation upon generation”, sings Ferretti in Cronaca montana: oh, but it can be done, indeed it must be done). Above all, my studies served this purpose: to leave behind the affiliations I had not chosen: my partner, family, school, church, football team – and my city, too. Changing cities—stepping into the universal not just with my mind but also with my feet, putting hundreds of kilometres between my past and my future, between the community others had chosen for me and the community of my own choosing—was decisive, vital, so much so that it convinced me this is one of the surest ways not just to grow but to improve: at some point, sooner rather than later, to leave. From that moment on, it has been a long process of shedding, layers of skin shed or torn away, a process less difficult than in the past because I had reached the age of reason, was self-aware and knew that I was capable of choosing my own allegiances.

It was less difficult, at least at first. Because it was simply a matter of attending lectures, studying and sitting exams: another solipsist’s paradise. The city where I was studying, Pisa, was no longer the hyper-political Pisa of the 1960s and 1970s, but almost all the professors teaching us had lived through that era. Some of their comrades had entered parliament or local government; others had become journalists. They had stayed on, and for the most part they were good lecturers. Surprisingly, the academic environment was less mindlessly politicised than it is today, mainly because, at least in the niche I had chosen – literature – there still existed a genuine devotion to old books and old ideas, to Tradition, in short, and a certain healthy tendency to separate one’s political views and activism from one’s academic interests. There were, admittedly, a few fanatics who would spend the class time giving us instructions on what to do at the next anti-NATO demonstration at Camp Darby; but for the rest – to feel satisfied, to justify their existence – it was enough to slap a few ideological labels onto their time-honoured humanities studies (labels that were somewhat childish but harmless, such as ‘towards a materialist study of literature’ and the like), or to haphazardly apply the theories of Marx and Lukács to the poems of the troubadours.

However, here at last are the freedoms I once dreamed of as a young student: university is the place where one can study whatever one wishes, in whatever manner, without having to swear allegiance to a particular method or teacher. There are those who do, of course—the fanatics, those in need of a membership card— “For a materialist approach to study…” – but all you had to do was ignore them. After all, the pressure to be part of a group, to put your name down on a list, to rally under a banner was infinitely less intense than that which my teachers must have endured at my age: I was a happy member of the post-ideological generation. In the faculty hall, the course timetables – listing the names of the lecturers, the subjects and the course titles – hinted at an infinite number of possibilities, at a multitude of things to learn. That was the promise of university, and it is a promise which, for me at least, the university has fully kept.

Then, of course, that absolute freedom was somewhat diluted by career considerations, and because, as one gets older, one has to declare one’s allegiances, to take one side rather than the other. The task now was no longer to rid oneself of unchosen affiliations but to avoid new, unwanted ones: to dodge, to let others do what we would not want done to us. The following is an incomplete list of opportunities to commit to a community that have been presented to me and that I have managed to avoid: Joining a political party. Oh well. Admission to a Masonic lodge. Oh yes, a dream: to spend a bit of the time I have left amongst elderly men like those who, on Friday evenings in Florence, stroll down Borgo degli Albizi in worn-out blue suits, briefcase slung over their shoulder, on their way to or from their lodge...

‘Doing something’ within my trade association. This is a trend that, when I was a student, had not yet spread to the university: trade associations, these charming little mafias. No, no. “Doing something” within my university. All right, but only what’s strictly necessary: deputy director, not director; secretary, not president. And if not, call in sick, hide away, die without holding any office. The alumni association of my secondary school or my university. Let’s be serious.

Yet one must surely revere someone or something; one must pledge allegiance to something; and as a boy I made this crucial discovery: that I had to pledge my allegiance above all to the dead, or to those far away. Or rather, not simply ‘as a boy’ but from the day when, aged six, I entered the newly opened library in my neighbourhood. This unexpected, unprepared encounter with books worked much like imprinting in ducks: I never looked away again. Not that I became indifferent to the community of the living; not that carving out a niche for myself in the past alienated me from the present, or from an interest in the present: quite the contrary. Yet reading so much, constantly, has developed in me precisely that ambivalent sentiment or that ambivalent nature – I am well aware that this is the most banal quotation in the world: but it is the right one – of which Machiavelli speaks in his letter to Francesco Vettori: the normal, everyday life, spent amongst others, and then the life spent listening to the voice of writers, which is the true life.

Over time, I became a resident of a universe whose existence was unknown to the people who had lived alongside me until I was eighteen, and which, to their misfortune, they would never enter. And that made all the difference.

The article was published in issue 3/2026 of *il Mulino*, dedicated to “Appartenenze”.