Curiously, I was about to write these notes six months ago. I had just returned from the United States where my 18-year-old daughter had just “graduated”, as they say, from an American high school, through those cultural exchanges that allow final year students to obtain new experience of life and study in foreign countries.
With my daughter in Winona, Minnesota, there were Russians, Finns. Koreans and so on. It is in another spirit that I would have described the reaction of the teachers in a famous Scientific High School in Rome, where the lass had profitably attended the first three years; you need only know that the English teacher had complained that she would come back with a “terrible American accent”…, to say nothing of the comment common to almost all the teaching body on the “superficiality of the Americans”, contrasted naturally with our history… Writing just after coming back, I would willingly have connoted as my own experience, even though based on a mere ten days, the province of the far north, towards Canada, on the arms of the Mississipi: how they live, where they live, what they say, the profound difference between the Americans of Winona and their fellow countrymen in Chicago, a few hours away by car … I think once again of Chicago, of those phenomenal skyscrapers, some very distinctive, and you can imagine what comes into my mind as I write today (just imagine you as you read, with those incumbent fears). But there is at least one story I must tell you. Anyway, Winona is a wholly horizontal place, in summer bordered by the river or, better, by the branches into which the Mississipi divides, and in winter accompanied by interminable skating lanes on the ice above them. I said ‘horizontal’, and in truth the collective psychology of Americans is horizontal, skyscrapers apart, while that of Europeans and Orientals is vertical… The problem of crosswords is that the square needs both sides… The crossword weekly, “Settimana Enigmatistica” says so, but so does world history. Well, Winona and its little houses contain about twenty or thirty thousand souls, naturally with a great amount of space available to them, schools, sports facilities etc. And these houses, some of them really beautiful and distinguished, many average, a few down at heel but still dignified, have no great padlocks, gratings or security systems such as we have; nothing. You ring, you enter.
Very often the front door, glazed like it is in the films, stays open. Fine. The day after my arrival, because of a trivial problem of cell phones and recharging (attention, our leading phone companies would all go bankrupt there; compared to us few people have cell phones, and still less do they use them) I entered a shop with workshop adjoining. While they were doing things with my cell phone, my gaze landed on a sheet of paper stuck to a partition wall. It was sort of decalogue, I don’t remember whether the commandments numbered 26 or 27, but the mildest of them was “If you want a true friend, rely on your rifle” or something of the kind. The whole decalogue (“you are free only if you are armed” etc) was marked by a sort of do-it-yourself approach to personal safety which was astonishing when compared to the total openness and freedom of the houses. My daughter told me that the decalogue was not really so common; certainly it was strikingly peremptory.
I am thinking over that episode, over that contradiction (but is the open house so inconsistent with weapon-bearing in the local mentality?) after the attack on the Twin Towers and I have before my eyes an interview with Susan Sontag, the American writer who did not stop reasoning even the day after the immense tragedy. She said, summarising “Too much cowboy rhetoric” and “This country is anarchic and conformist at the same time”. At the time of my visit, six months ago, there was a different feel in the air, surveys in hand (wealth, career etc).
Now – and unfortunately it is far from finished - personal safety and doubts about the future of the planet are the two sides of the crossword of which above. How much horizontal, how much vertical do we have to try to make intersect in order to survive?

(trad. Interpres sas Giussano)