Review of La Notte (1961) by Lanning : — 25 Mar 2007

Lidia (reading): When I awoke this morning, you were still asleep. As I awoke, I heard your gentle breathing. I saw your closed eyes beneath wisps of stray hair, and I was deeply moved. I wanted to cry out, to wake you, but you slept so deeply, so soundly.

In the half light your skin glowed with life, so warm and sweet, I wanted to kiss it, but I was afraid to wake you. I was afraid of you awake in my arms again. Instead I wanted something no one could take from me, mine alone, this eternal image of you.

Beyond your face I saw a pure, beautiful vision, showing us in the perspective of my whole life, all the years to come, even all the years passed. That was the most miraculous thing: to feel, for the first time, that you had always been mine, that this night would go on forever, united with your warmth, your thought, your will.

At that moment I realized how much I loved you, Lidia. I wept with the intensity of the emotion, for I felt that this must never end. We would remain like this all our lives, not only close, but belonging to each other in a way that nothing could ever destroy, except the apathy of habit, the only threat.

Then you wakened and, smiling, put your arms around me, kissed me, and I felt there was nothing to fear. We would always be as we were at that moment, bound by stronger ties than time and habit. Giovanni: Who wrote that? Lidia: You did.

The night does end, both literally and figuratively. The writer who wrote with such passion of his love, at some time somehwere in the past, has become, like his wife and his marriage, a victim of time and habit, and can no longer recognize his own words of passion.

I really don't think this is an indication of the times so much as it is a sadly timeless story about the course of love in some marriages destined to dissolve because of the "apathy of habit.

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