Mentions personal use of The Last Diary.

Transcript context

…She wrote about homecomings to places that don’t exist anymore, also. She did. One of the things that also really struck me was, at the end of her life, she was almost blind. And still the drive to write was so intense and constant. So her husband, her second husband, the one who survives her, was explaining that when she was in the final phase of her life and could barely see, she had these enormous pieces of paper and would just write a couple of words, a sentence or two, a day. The words were just burning with life and with her need to express herself in spite of the disability. These writings were collected in a book called The Last Diary, which I read. They’re almost like little fragments, epigrams, some of these little entries. And one of them says, “La mia quasi cecità = un punto di vista,” which means “My blindness is a point of view.” I really marveled at that because I felt it explained, at least to me, the purpose of writing in Italian. Because, of course, she wasn’t totally blind; she was partially blind. And I’m not totally blind in Italian either, but I feel partially blind. I don’t want to compare myself to her because she had actually a physical issue with her eyesight. She didn’t choose that for herself, and she suffered for it. Whereas my project is something that comes from me and it’s voluntary. But it is this kind of voluntary blindness, right? But it’s richer for you to read in Italian, and maybe even sometimes to write in Italian now because the partial blindness gives you a new lens on all these problems you’ve been trying to come to terms with —…

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