Wisdom of the Aged

A birthday greeting to myself:

Now that I am getting old and begin to approach the patriarchic state, I too feel that it is worse to preach immorality than to practice it. One may be driven to commit murder by love or hatred, but one can only advocate murder out of sheer wickedness.

--Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno 30 (Alfred A. Knopf ed., 1930, 1958)

Afterthought: By my count, this is my 27,029th day on the planet, including Leap Days. The Leap Days, and actually 19 Leap Days somehow seems like more than 27,029 days.

Like Anna Magnani?

Zeno in Italo Svevo's great novel, thought Latin is a language unsuited to women; so much so that he "thought that even among the ancient Romans the women had talked Italian." This is not as crazy an idea as it sounds at first blush, non è vero? I mean, set aside all the sociobabble about how men and women talk differently. There are cultures, are there not, where men and women really do have different languages? So maybe ancient Roman women really did talk Latin.

Source: Italo Svevo, The Confessions of Zeno 68 (Alfred A. Knopf ed 1930, 1958).