Sometimes, as other people analyze their conscience, I find myself “analyzing my personality”, in the widest sense of the word, which includes temperament, courage, sensitivity, charm, ethics, intelligence, wealth, and education; and the “genuine” personal advantages, such as a great talent or a great heart. My goal is not to identify some essential truth in which I may recognize myself… quite the opposite, I purge my memory looking for as many ingredients of my personality as I can… I then rationalize and readjust them.

The “I” in me, baby, resides in a house of happy turbulence, full of beauty and wonderment and depth of feelings, that power of imagination capable of turning any common experience into something so great and beautiful. I couldn’t live in any of the worlds given to me: the world of my relatives, the world of those self-deluded who get used to moving throughout the world as alien creatures, thinking of humankind, in general, as “they” instead of “we”… the world of politics, with the pedantic excess of a foolish system that establishes a condition of quiet and security through war, through the never-ending accumulation of armament and the inevitable antilogy that “they are acting in the interests of humanity”, when in fact, they are doing just the opposite. And the list is much longer than that, I know, baby… it is virtually endless.

Then I come to a point where I would say it matters to know where we came from, it matters to know the long, long road that we have come through. Indeed, life, despite its chaotic fluctuations, is far less brutal than it used to be, and this is the thing that gives me hope we can go further.

Politeness belongs to the discipline of polish.