Pirandello on Things

In preparation for a trip to Sicily later this spring, I’ve been reading some books about the island and by Sicilians. One of them is The Late Mattia Pascal¸ an early novel by Luigi Pirandello. Today I came upon the following passage, which very clearly explains why it is so difficult to throw things away. I’m surprised that he thought and wrote this in 1904. Pirandello won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934.

“Every object is transformed within us according to the images it evokes, the sensations that cluster around it. To be sure, an object may please us for itself alone, for the pleasant feelings that a harmonious sight inspires in us, but far more often the pleasure that an object affords us does not derive from the object in itself. Our fantasy embellishes it, surrounding it, making it resplendent with images dear to us. Then we no longer see it for what it is, but animated by the images it arouses in us or by the things we associate with it. In short, what we love about the object is what we put in it of ourselves, the harmony established between it and us, the soul that it acquires only through us, a soul composed of our memories.”

(Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal, translated by William Weaver, 1964. Hygiene, Colorado: Eridanos Press, Inc. 1987, p. 100).