A Quote
Hello😄
My wife Lea and I have been in Italy for the last two weeks. We have been to Italy many times in the past and our usual trip involves Florence or the country area around Florence. We love the history and beauty of Tuscany.
This time we decided to see parts of northern Italy and we drove from Florence to Piemonte, then to Monselice, and on to Mantova and Bologna. We were tourists poking around and it was a spectacular trip, especially the smaller city of Mantova (cannot recommend visiting Mantova highly enough).
Bologna was a huge surprise to us. The centro (the old part of the city in the center) is an incredibly busy and active place teaming with young people. We could not believe the number of people everywhere and how alive the place felt. In addition the architecture of the centro is so unique with all the streets lined with "portici" which are walkways like this that cover 38km of the center:
The other stunning thing about Bologna and the portici is the graffiti. It is everywhere, and honestly the amount of it was disappointing to us. However, the reason I am telling you about the portici of Bologna and its relentless graffiti is because I came across the above quote written on one of the columns:
I was struck by the quote and snapped the photo, and today I looked up the origin of the quote - the line comes from the character Mitya Karamazov in Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1869 novel The Brothers Karamazov who utters it in a moment of despair mixed with hope. The phrase embodies the experience of Dostoevsky in Russia during that era: immersed in the shadows of Russian existential gloom, yet in dark times, brightness doesn’t vanish—it’s revealed.
I have experienced this on many occasions in my life when in the moment things can seem so dark and oppressive, yet the darkness has a way of clearing out the mental closet so you can finally see what is in there that is most important to you.
When I went to Hazelden my life closet was overflowing with years of accumulated activities and junk that needed clearing out so I could see what was most valuable and meaningful to me. For me, it took getting to a dark, dark night so I could actually start to see the stars in my existence and what was most important to me.
If you find yourself in a dark space, try to look up from the forest of your life and find the stars in your life and universe. Not easy, but so worth the effort.
