La vita fuori di sé

Who has never had the sudden resurfacing in memory of the trip that swept away many certainties, that erotic encounter so intense that true pleasure was discovered, or the unexpected and disconcerting effect of a book, a painting, a melody that literally dragged us beyond the limits of our ego? It is the adventures, experiences that break the routine, forgotten or removed fractures that, seriouslyvoked, rekindle silenced desires. In a compelling hand-to-hand combat with the foundational texts of Western culture and the most original contemporary readings, the author brings into dialogue the problems of our everyday life and Herodotus’ Histories, Georg Simmel’s insights and Kazantzakis’ Odyssey, Sartre’s theater and Plato’s “confessions” in his most autobiographical writing, Montaigne’s ironic wisdom and Jankélévitch’s unsettling metaphors. As in a travelogue, fascinating connections across centuriesand continents thus take us back to the field ofMarathon, to the roots of the concepts of freedom and happiness for the Greeks; to South America with Alexandervon Humboldt, forerunner of an idea of nature that we cannot help but make our own; to Prague, among the scandalized audience of the premiere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni; and to the North African desert, on the trail of the writer Isabelle Eberhardt. An invitation to question ourselves without necessarily resorting to an escape into the wild, because “a daring undertaking or an unremarkable episode: everything can be adventure or ordinary existence, it can fit into the script of our lives or take the shape of an exhilarating exception, which, however, ‘mysteriously’ holds that unconfessed vocation that the everyday does not know how to bring to light.”