Three O'Clock in the Morning

The sea was calm, with very slight ripples on which the sunlight produced a constantly changing glitter that, for some inexplicable reason, made me think of eternity.

Ci sono occasioni in cui occorre parlare e non bisogna dare nulla per scontato. Poi ci sono occasioni in cui, invece, devi rimanere in silenzio perché nell'aria c'è qualcosa d'impalpabile e prezioso, e le tue parole potrebbero disperderlo in un istante. Sono due concetti semplici. La parte difficile è decidere quando applicare una regola e quando l'altra.

I was starting to grasp the mysteries of the city in which we had been moving for many hours now. It was as if I sensed its hidden spaces, its secret lives, the windows where people’s silhouettes passed for a moment and disappeared forever. I glimpsed, in the broken lines of those streets, the hidden code of my present life and above all my future one.

I didn’t know what to say in reply, so I simply nodded, which always works because the meaning is put into it by the person you are talking to.

You could sense the end of the night, like an omen. After it, as happened every morning, nothing would be the same.

The nice thing about jazz is its imperfection….Imcompleteness distinguishes jazz from any other type of music. In classical music, for example, the score contains all the notes to be played. The performer reads it and plays the written notes, nothing less but also nothing more. His performance is all about the many different ways he can interpret those notes, but the notes are always the same. In jazz, the score in just the starting point.

When he finished, summing up the meaning of what he had played in two conclusive, melancholy scales, there was a burst of friendly applause. And I also applauded and kept doing so until I was sure he had seen me, because I was starting to realize that there are such things as misunderstandings and I didn’t want there to be any at that moment.

All'inizio fui colto dall'euforia [...] Poi l'euforia svanì e lasciò il posto allo sgomento. La pillola, il suo rituale e quello che c'era intorno erano stati, in quegli anni, alibi perfetti per evitare ogni responsabilità e sentirmi anche in credito con la vita. Adesso, di punto in bianco, gli alibi non c'erano più [...] D'un tratto mi ritrovavo in mare aperto, e non ero pronto

-Disse che mi avrebbe preso nove. In teoria la soluzione in un tempo così breve avrebbe meritato il massimo, aggiunse, però se mi avesse messo dieci avrebbe dato per implicito che non c'era nulla da migliorare e avrebbe contribuito a farmi sprecare il mio talento.