Every self-respecting writer should have a mentor, a character to refer to, a beacon in the night to turn to in times of difficulty or uncertainty. That full stop represents a safe haven from the storm of commas and other uncertain interludes he must battle every day. The basis thanks to which that same writer is able to bear the weight of the situation that torments him/her. That figure, although in most cases is someone with whom you do not have many contacts, embodies a totem, a support structure on which you develop your skills and ameliorate yourself.
Writers are strange, you might think, and you would have every reason to say it aloud: people who indulge in a river of reflections and mental flights, who write about the lives of others, who give a body to the immateriality of opinions or emotions, yet they need immaterial support. Someone to dedicate their works to, someone to thank for their successes. Very often we thank family and relatives, the legacy of materiality that makes us so empathetic; but in reality, we know that our totem is always there, watching over our words, our ideas and our career.
When this totem passes away, the writer loses a piece of himself. In this world we shouldn’t be less, we should be more. Each additional brain would represent a better solution to the problems that arise every day. When death steals life from the physical world, a sense of general pain subsides like thick winter fog after a massive thunderstorm. But the writer makes emotion his weapon: it is the ink in which he dips his pen. And when he is the protagonist of an adverse event, his emotions are elevated to the nth degree; when he learns of a mourning that ink falls on him and like an indelible stain remains there as long as he has breath. And if that mourning concerns a totem, a mentor, a guide, then that stain extends to the depths of his soul.
Torn, torn to shreds. He hands over his suffering to a last poem, an epitaph dedicated to a person who was able to take an immature professional by the hand and accompany him along a path of progressive maturation. The keyboard is blurry and the keys are heavy to press, and it is a struggle to put ideas together because there is only one that silences all the others: “My mentor, my teacher is dead”.
At the age of 80, Gary North passed away.
When I started my blog ten years ago, I was looking for an identity. At first it was just a desk where scattered papers fluttered around every day. In that mess of ideas, I found my inspiration in a man who made simplicity and immediacy his strengths. With a single text he was able to communicate in a clear and crystalline way concepts that until then the common imagination had drawn as unattainable by an audience “not properly trained”. I immediately fell in love with his writing, striking myself as the legendary mallet of the Scandinavian gods. The magnetism with which he captured the attention was unique, no other writer has been able to create works like his: he spoke to you in an elementary language, yet what you were learning were a much more elaborate analysis than the appearance conveyed. At that moment I knew I had to take his hand if I wanted to find my place.
That’s how it was. My way of writing has changed, dragged by the vigorous passion that I felt flow every time I put myself in front of the screen to compose one of my essay. And like a blacksmith’s bellows, which blows with greater intensity when the works are of the finest workmanship, my inspiration blew with anxious enthusiasm to churn out new articles and, above all, worthy of being considered as good as North’s ones. Each time a mistake, each time a too complicated paragraph, they provided me with the propellant to improve myself and reach a level of optimum comparable to his marvelous works. Composing and communicating to achieve that perfection has been the litany that has accompanied my blog for years.
A mixture of nostalgia and pride assails me when I think back to the exchange of emails we began to have when, taking courage, I had to inform him that I would translate in Italian his Christian Economics into One Lesson. To exorcise the moment in which I would receive an answer, I repeated to myself that he had more important things to do, but when the inbox signaled his answer an explosion of pride and emotion permeated me as I read his answer. It was like the embrace of a father who, enthusiastic about his son, looks at him with eyes full of pride without saying a word. Surprised by my dedication to his writings, he was amazed that someone on the other side of the world had taken his writing as a model and shared it with his fellow citizens. From that moment on, he would write to me every now and then to report him articles worthy of note and that he would like to see them published. But most of all, he was happy that his book would be available in Italian.
And this is how I will remember him: that flash of happiness that made a little writer proud of his teacher, and that “unknown” boy who enthusiastically communicated that he had allowed a wider audience to know your works.
Goodbye dear Gary, until we meet again.
