Come vetro

Like glass. When I was invited to write "something" for this magazine on the subject of fragility at first I felt embarrassed being not a psychologist: I am engaged in a different activity and have never written an article neither for a newspaper nor for a magazine specialized in a matter that I am not familiar with. The embarrassment disappeared when I was proposed to write a story. I was grateful for this and, feeling at ease, I began to think and work at it. The result is this story where the subject of the fragility is treated starting from a glass and arriving to the heart. We know that both are made in fragile materials and, if stressed by internal or external solicitations, they can modify their own status till the point of break. This is what happens, in a different way, to the two protagonists of this story. One of them, an architect from Milan, is a very active man. He is continuously engaged in his job and can’t stop even when, on a short holiday on the mountain , he is able to ski all the day. The other one is an elegant, absorbed and calm gentleman who seems to feel vaguely uncomfortable in the world. He lives in Venice, the town of the slow rhythms and of the many melancholies. He directs a glass factory in Murano. Their encounters are few and fortuitous but something in somehow ties them, just at first exchanged glance. The architect will discover this only reading on the newspaper that is friend dead and probably not in an accidental way.

Keywords: Defect, explosion, sensation, glance, apprehension, embarrassment, splinter, pain.

Maria Antonietta Parolin, Come vetro in "EDUCAZIONE SENTIMENTALE" 26/2016, pp 153-157, DOI: 10.3280/EDS2016-026010