LUIGI GRASSIA
“What to write, what to tell? / Party several times for overseas lands “is the opening words of an old song by Roberto Vecchioni, which continues:” You don’t need red pencil marks / because you can’t draw the map anyway / I only become a navigated man / To starboard boatswain, the dream has already passed ”. This verse can come to mind when reading Tiziana Bonomo’s book / interview with Domenico Quirico “The charm of imperfection” (Jaca Book, p. 196, 27 euros); the volume contains all this, including a sober consideration on the dream that has already passed, but compared to the song it offers much more, because Quirico has managed to draw his map of the world, and how, he is not an ordinary man who has nothing to say , he found the meaning of his navigation, although it is not necessarily beautiful to describe in every detail, and it cannot be condensed into a few formulas; it takes this whole book to account for it, a dense book yet, in some mysterious way, easy to metabolize.
For those unfamiliar with him, Quirico is one of the first signatures of the newspaper you are reading, known all over the world for a story he would have gladly done without, namely the kidnapping and detention in Syria at the hands of the worst scum. can imagine. Of course we also talk about this, in a chapter, but Quirico does not do it often: when asked, he answers, he does not make a medal.
To explain his relationship with the profession, this quote is perhaps better than all: as a journalist Quirico is interested in “the man in flesh and blood, the man who breathes, who pees, who makes mistakes, who is violent (… ) I’m not so interested in the path of ideas and ideologies, they are interested in men (…) Africa is the place where the relationship between men and history is more brutal, without a parachute, without the possibility of exempting oneself from fundamental questions: will we be able to survive hunger, pain, war? (…) I am not very interested in the path of a part of the world where the problems are of an economic, financial, political or constitutional nature. I’m interested in where men are confronted with the eternal, with survival, with God ”. Therefore Quirico has toured the least hospitable and most dangerous places on the planet, looking for them from Africa to Asia and from South America to Russia, focusing in recent years on the Middle East, where the confrontation with “the eternal, survival and God ”is a daily experience.
It is not like dealing with tennis or Sanremo, and the waste of the many atrocities encountered in the world, not only during imprisonment, accumulates: “Having seen them in the totality of their insignificance or their ferocity has made the others physically unbearable (. ..) The world around me gives me psychological urticaria “. Yet Quirico would like to leave tomorrow, today: “The journalist is the one who fulfills the elementary obligation to go to the places he has had the task of telling, to live with those who in those places are facing a certain experience – often very painful , tragic, even terminal – and then he narrates it for those who cannot go to those places ”. Frecciata: “Today journalism is about managing social networks that honestly do not belong to me”.
History belongs to him, however, “the enormous pleasure I have always felt in reading what happened in the past somewhere, somewhere in time. Seeing alive the people who lived, I know, twenty centuries ago ”. And of his Quirico he has also written many history books, as well as thousands of articles (historiography of the instant).
Finally, the philosophical consideration on the “already finished dream” we mentioned: “My relationship with time has become dramatic because I have the impression that I no longer have any, that the hourglass has very little sand in the upper part. The past is mine, I’m fine there, I wallow in it, even the most remote. It is the present, and above all the little future, that anguishes me ”. But what would Quirico do with time if he were allowed more? We do not quote a single answer but summarize those that appear on various pages: he would spend the extra time with his wife and daughters, he would grind thousands of kilometers more in his races at dawn, he would read “all the books that I will never read and that I already have there ”, and above all he would leave by plane to distant horizons, to continue writing the history of the moment.