"25th October

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
If we think of the future, we always see it unrolling itself
in a monotonous progression. We forget that the past is
a multicolored chaos of generations. This can help
console us for the terrors inspired by the "technical and
totalitarian barbarization" of the future. In the next hundred
years it may well happen that we have a sequence of at
least three moments; and the human spirit will be able to
live consecutively in the streets, in prison, and in the papers.
The same can be said of one's personal future."

"26th October

If only we could treat ourselves as we treat other men;
looking at their withdrawn faces and crediting them with
some mysterious, irresistable power. Instead, we know all our
own faults, our misgivings, and are reduced to hoping for
some unconscious force to surge up from our inmost being
and act with a subtlety all its own."
(1938)


Cesare Pavese
*The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1959"
Walker and Company
1961