The Barbaric

At least we could pull out,
we could starve to death in freedom, and say No
to a life that makes use of love and family and pity
and a little plot of land to tie us together, and shackle our hands.
Cesare Pavese: Smokers of paper

In the middle of the most beautiful mountains of the world, next to the Italian and Austrian borders, this year again Tonalestate invites you to spend our holidays with us. In this opportunity we can listen to intellectual’s experiences, artist’s , literacy’s, scientist’s, culture and action man that dedicate their lives and talents in order to turn the world more human and more habitable.

This year, Tonalestate surprises us in a good way, with the subject “the Reason”, antique almost as the world, that is nowadays such an urgent necessity (“the reason’s pathology has not be written yet” says a well-known contemporary philosopher). The Tonalestate surprises us also with an untamable, extravagant and unusual manifest (poster): a laic and saint (holly) invitation that comes from the remarkable voice and colors full of questions of two out of the ordinary men, Cesare Pavese and Vincent Van Gogh, men with an unusual talent, with a huge intelligence and a huge humanity. Two men that with their lasting and proved patience opened our eyes about our so many ways of life that are senseless.

We agree with Jean Delumeau when he says “nous ne sommes pas un siècle à paradis”: so, in such a time we are living in it, which choices are reasonable and which are not? We know that we do not want to be party nor victims of a social context that seems to move looking only to ruin our nights, to destroy our days. A context that makes us live in an unnatural isolation, a context that often deafen us and confuses us with images, music, and slogan that have taken the place of words and therefore the dialogue. Someone or something (it used to be called “the system” once) leads us to stay at our homes, to cultivate a special kind of misery and small orchard; leads us to use form of protests that we know from the beginning are underdogs; leads us to beware from others, leads us to have a huge respect for disregard; leads us to discuss about things that have nothing to do with the common good, and pushes us even to fight for a country that is not ours. How can we avoid being victims nor party of a system so far from that paradise that every man’s heart yearns maybe without knowing it?

What kind of “barbaric” will know how to bring down the harmful corporation’s incalculable power (and governments that unfortunately are their solid allies) that decide who must suffer and who doesn’t, who must eat and who doesn’t, who has to succumb to the bombings and who has to find a way to pass the boredom whatever it costs?

What kind of barbaric will know how to comfort the deep uneasiness of who is obligated to migrate certainly not for tourism with the hope to find bread, peace and work? The Tonalestate, with his manifest (poster), rises a hymn of gratitude to this unknown “barbaric”, that professor Giovanni Riva founded many years ago, bringing forward that feel the bern that knew how to rejoice us with its operative and unwavering hope.