This is not a Manzonian farewell to the mountains, mine is not an escape, there is not a shadow of regret in my return to my homeland, and mine is not a farewell, but rather a see you later; on the Laurebina Pass Manaslu, the mountain of the spirit, reached me with its warning. I watched it from afar, in the ecstatic contemplation of an unexpressed desire. In those places, among those valleys, those villages, those peaks I gained the best part of myself, my absence, and wherever one gains one's absence it is normal to assume one will return there.
In the West, the quintessence of the journey is that towards Ithaca, and Ulysses the quintessence of the traveler but it is a false concept: in the Odyssey there is no trace of a desire for absence on Ulysses' part, he finds himself suffering his own presence with the poignant nostalgia of home, of Penelope, of Ithaca; Ulysses sits on a rock and cries. He suffers his own journey, and while we read and admire his exploits, he is preparing to return at all costs to his Ithaca, which despite himself escapes him. Ultimately, the Western reader wants Ulysses as a fugitive, it is the reader, not Poseidon, Ulysses' bitter enemy, the true theòs who forces him into exile. Ulysses' is ultimately the story of a tragic presence. Ulysses is condemned to himself. The judge who issues the verdict is the Western reader.
There is something sadistic in the Western reader, and it is a sadism that satisfies him, and satisfies the condemnation of man to himself. Until the sixteenth century, man is an organ in the hands of God, then man discovers that he is man. In the eighteenth century, with the Enlightenment, man discovers that he can create his own world, discovers that he can be God. In the nineteenth century, man experiences the shadows of this God, of any God, in this case of this God called man and, in the twentieth century, he will end up, with Freud and psychoanalysis, by self-destructing. Man will discover that he is not up to the level of his own presence. God will die, man will remain, with his torments, his presence. The decline of the West evoked by Spengler is nothing other than the condemnation of man to himself, to the obsessive presence of himself.
It will be physics, not philosophy, that will restore a semblance of absence to man, with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics will restore to man the void, the indeterminacy, the immateriality of matter. Man will doubt that the more immaterial the matter, the more material the spirit. After millennia of forced separation, first by Plato and then by Christian patristics, man will finally be able to think of himself as spirit and matter in one.
But in the East they have known this for a long time. Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching - a poem, a philosophical work, a story or whatever it is - tells all this well before Niels Bohr, Werner Heisemberg and Albert Einstein, just a few thousand years.
When I actually realized the idea of leaving for Nepal, some of my friends snubbed my initiative saying:
- What are you going to do in Nepal? In Italy we have those mountains! -
The whole world envies us the Dolomites. The Dolomites are full of trails that wind everywhere through their panoramas. One of the most challenging and complete trails is the Alta Via 2. The Alta Via 2 flies over the rugged peaks of the Dolomites between Bressanone and Feltre. Bressanone and Feltre are two very beautiful and very un-Mediterranean cities, on a human scale, where the houses have sloping roofs, the grass is green, the lawns are well-kept, the infrastructure is Austrian-made, that is, decent, without a hole, asphalt as a mirror surface, where light and, let's imagine, water are never lacking, where there are no small cars, where nothing is left to chance and neglect, in short, they are cities where everything is glossy, even life. But it's not just about Bressanone and Feltre. Is it clearer now why I chose to go to Nepal?
My next trip will be to the Dolomites. I will do the Alta Via 2. I will do it to take possession of the Dolomites, to find the absence of Bressanone and Feltre. I will do it to take possession of my absence there too.
Gabriele Mastropaolo.