Comparison between the quotations from R. Cotroneo’s work, Tweet di un discorso amoroso

1)      Le regole dell’attrazione le ricercano tutti. Ma sono le regole della distrazione quelle più interessanti, e non le cerca nessuno.

2)      Il senso della misura è incommensurabile, in questa modernità.

3)      Il pudore è un’intermittenza dello stile.

4)      I ricordi indietreggiano sempre: come fa il tempo quando lo vai a cercare. Poi, quando li metti spalle al muro, sanno raccontarti tutto.

5)      Ma del pericolo dell’antiletteratura, si è accorto qualcuno? E non è altrettanto grave?

At a first glance, the quotations from R. Cotroneo’s work appear very different, and, to some extent, also obscure.

The first quotation focuses on the relationship between attraction and distraction. As it appears from the word itself, dis-traction is the opposite of attraction; but the prefix –dis also adds a sense of distance and separation. Indeed, a distraction occurs when our attention is disturbed, is attracted by something or someone who is outside the centre of our attention. As such, distraction reveals inner aspects of our personality, sides of our conscience that we usually hide from other people. As a matter of fact, psychoanalysis studies the phenomenon known as “lapsus” because it is a type of distraction through which hidden aspects of our identity reveal themselves. Thus, distraction is strictly bound to the secret aspects of our personality, and it is a way to explore and reveal the secrets (both conscious and unconscious ones) of an individual.

The second quotation is clearly an oxymoron: the sense of the measure is immeasurable. However, the key to understand such paradox is in the final words: “in our modernity”. Our contemporary world is full of examples where the “sense of measure” is broken or forgotten. People often try to achieve what is objectively beyond their capabilities, or they act and behave in a way that is not suitable in a public environment. That is why this sense is incommensurable: we have forgotten what “sense of measure” means and we do not realize when we trespass the limit that society requires from us.

Somewhat similar is the third quotation. Decency seems to work as a temporary suspension of the style (arguably, of the writing style, but also of the living style): it is no more a value, or a meter (thus the link with the previous quotation) to be used in order to value what may be appropriate, and what may not, but it becomes just a choice to temporarily stop a style generally devoid of any decency.

The fifth quotation, on the contrary, bears some affinity with the first quotation. Here the problem is not literature, is “anti-literature”. People generally focus on the positive element of a couple of contraries, and they end up forgetting the other element. In this case, they focus too much on literature, and they forget that also anti-literature may conceal risks and dangers, possibly even worse than the ones brought by literature, which is often blamed of causing incomprehension between people.

The fourth quotation is about time. Memories walk back like time because time passes, and so they appear more and more distant, as we progress through life. However, if we put them against a wall, they will tell us everything. This means that the distance between ourselves and our memories, although it grows every moment of our life, is also what makes possible for us to better understand what those memories mean: learning from a past event is possible only when there is a certain distance in time, so that we can see events in “another light”, and reinterpret situations that where once misunderstood, since we were directly involved in.