Today I live on an island, in a house that is sad, hard, severe, that I built for myself, solitary on a sheer rock over the sea: a house that is the spectre, the secret image of prison. The image of my nostalgia. Maybe I never desired, not even then, to escape from jail. Man is not meant to live freely in freedom, but to be free inside a prison.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the complexity of freedom and the relationship between solitude and personal prison.
Curzio Malaparte's quote delves into the paradox of freedom and the human condition, suggesting that true freedom may not lie in external circumstances but within one's own mental state. He portrays his solitude on an island as a form of imprisonment, indicating that personal nostalgia and emotional ties can render one's freedom illusory, inviting reflection on how one navigates the inner and outer realms of existence.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the nature of solitude and personal freedom.
I think if a physician wrote on a death certificate that old age was the cause of death, he'd be thrown out of the union. There is always some final event, some failure of an organ, some last attack of pneumonia, that finishes off a life. No one dies of old age.
It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
There is no such thing as Freedom (though it is the most important condition of human life, after Humility, -which does not exist either). There is only Slavery (walls around one) and absence-of-Slavery (ability to walk in any direction, or to remain still).
It might be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.
If we were able to live at the level of the soul all the time, there would be no need for hindsight to appreciate the great truths of life.
I think the whole policy of pre-emptive war is a serious, serious mistake.
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