I’ve posted something very similar on my Italian blog, yesterday, but I want to do it again here, because…
Well, because terrible things keep happening, and everything seems to indicate that they will keep happening for Heaven knows how long. I was musing about it yesterday, and thinking how small, how inadequate it feels in such moments to sit down and write of history, and theatre, and books…
Then I found on Karavansara a quote of Charles De Lint’s, saying how writers keep shining little lights in the gathering darkness.
And I thought: yes, this is it. This is what I want to do too. Light up a little flame, and hope it will make readers think. Not to make them think something in particular – that readers can agree or disagree with what they read is a given… just think. And wonder, and ask questions, and maybe read up some author or historical character, or read a new book, or argue, or get angry, and light another flame… One hopes to make think – and to keep thinking, even in the midst of all the terrible things.
So yes – this is what we do with the stories, and history, and books, and theatre, in the firm belief that a thinking world will be better equipped against the darkness, and even the smallest light can help.
Music, today…
Were you one of those children always questioning things in fairy tales? You know the kind… Happy ever after? But what happened then? And if she had to be home by midnight, how come she wasn’t crushed inside the pumpkin halfway? And wouldn’t the Evil Queen know a deer’s heart from a human one? They can be a storyteller’s delight or life’s bane – depending on the storyteller’s nerve, I guess… 
I must say that I greatly miss my mentor.
Shall we call it field research?
I’ve always liked 
One thing of the English world that I wholeheartedly admire is the ability and will to keep the classics alive. In Italy we have this disastrous tendency to keep our Authors under glass, to be uncritically admired or nothing else…
Scribblings 