The idea of having time to do things

I live, like everyone, in the terrible hallucination that time is infinite. Clearly it isn't. This summer reminded me how deeply I live in the double illusion of having no time for what I enjoy and no time for what I should do. And I say should because the older I get, the more I realise that denying some primitive, ancestral morality — like taking care of others, of family — strikes me as simply pitiful. I feel pathetic, when I think about it.

I try not to think about it, but then the unexpected happens and I don't sleep for days. The illusion of doing meaningful things eats into the time we have to be with the people who taught us how to live and made us who we are. So you'll forgive me if this first issue of Kansei is dedicated to three people that the summer took from me.

Pietro, Francesca, and Beppe.

The first was my uncle: Don Pietro Polizzo. Don Pietro died at 94 in Niterói, having revolutionised Brazilian publishing. He'd started out — like many Italians of his generation — selling newspapers. My uncle taught me the value of money and that what matters, in books, is distribution. I always thought of him as a small Bezos. Small because he was short and wore a lot of rings. But he was enormous to me. My paternal grandparents died before I even existed, so he was the closest thing to a Calabrian grandfather I could have.

We think the people who raised us will watch our successes with pride, that they'll be there to see us, but very often they leave without warning. I want to turn the void left by that gaze into a productive force. I think all of us are destined to die trying to become for others whatever — or whoever — inspired us.

I had this family dream that one day I'd talk shop with my uncle about the publishing business and he'd look at me not as the hyperactive kid from the poor branch of the family but as an equal. We didn't say goodbye the last time I went to Brazil because I was at a party in Copacabana. I thought I had time. The second was Francesca. I didn't go to the hospital to see her. I thought I had time. I remember her dancing in a ballroom at a Marriott in Zamalek, teasing Luigi Santarelli in Barcelona, rescuing the dog Aristotle who was sinking in Puglia. The memories make me smile, but holding back tears is an effort that serves no purpose.

I've entered that stage of life where I start thinking about death: adulthood. The stage where you tell yourself you don't want to have regrets, but you do; where you tell yourself you should have spent more time with the people you loved, but you didn't. This society of doing, of consuming — certainly not of thinking — tells us it isn't death that defines our life but the things we do while life happens to us. To me that's a very Calvinist take on the whole thing, because maybe we are far more defined by what we don't do than by what we find ourselves doing. And so we are also what we were never able to be: present, every time we wished we had been. But our absence defines us in the eyes of those who loved us far more than our presence ever did. Absence is a deep groove. You run your finger along it and find the outline of a shape.

That was something Beppe taught me — Beppe, who had been a Brother in Christ for a while before he met Silvia. Beppe was a tremendous history and philosophy teacher; he used to take me hiking in the mountains when I was small, he told me stories. He was also a gifted writer and published two novels with L'Araba Fenice. He was working on a third, which if I remember correctly was set during the European Wars of Religion. He used to tell me that religion had always been a great identity-forming and historical pivot point for the peoples of Europe, and that without understanding Christ and the history of those who pray to him, it was impossible to make sense of so many things in contemporary history — the role of Russia, for instance, or why France and Germany are always at each other's throats.

Europe is a place of fallen empires that are never forgotten, Beppe told me about twenty years ago at La Maddalena. For many reasons I think he was right. I saw Beppe for the last time at my wedding; I told him about my research at KVA, we talked about God — but what I really would have liked was to hear him talk one last time about his books and the history of Europe, or to tell some story about some wild Jesus-worshipper in the French mountains, seven hundred years ago.

We can no longer hear Beppe's words on the Wars of Religion, but in August — in memory of my favourite emperor too — we'll be writing about empires and emperors.

The other day I was mindlessly scrolling Instagram and stopped on a reel that moved me. A grandson had helped his grandmother write a story inspired by her own life and published it on Amazon. The grandmother was in tears in the video, and hugging her grandson she said: