Elia Scotto

Artificial disconnection

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 04:06:21 GMT

Every time I take my dog for a walk, I see people talking to themselves, maybe with a phone in their hands or earphones on. Recently, I started wondering who they are talking to. Is there a human on the other side of the line, or are they having a conversation with an AI?

Given how conversational models work today, I would probably notice the person getting quite frustrated at times. Like an angry boss screaming at a junior employee, but without the filters that respectful communication implies. That would give the AI away. But soon these models will improve and get closer to the way humans communicate. Their hallucinations will become more subtle, to the point that it will be impossible to tell whom someone is talking to. People will start talking privately to AIs, and we won’t even notice the shift.

I believe AI will gradually erode our capacity to connect with each other.

I’ve seen this portrayed in the movie Her by Spike Jonze, where an AI capable of human conversation is released on the market. Many people have lonely conversations while walking around the city, visiting a museum, or having lunch in a restaurant. We can only guess that they are talking to their own AI.

In the movie, the artificial intelligence works quite similarly to the one we have right now. It gets to know you better the more you use it, and it’s designed to build a one-to-one relationship with you.

Theodore, the protagonist, is a professional ghostwriter. People no longer have the time or ability to write letters themselves, so they outsource the process to a company that crafts artificial handwritten letters for them. Customers send the service some information about the recipient and a few photos, and the writers dictate the text to a program that digitally mimics human handwriting. The social custom of handwritten letters is still present, but many people in the movie have lost the ability to communicate with others.

Many people are currently using AI to do tasks for them, like reading, writing, coding, research, and creative work. These are activities that require some brain work to accomplish, yet we seem perfectly happy to outsource them to an algorithm. Why? Because it’s faster, requires less effort, and, most importantly, doesn’t require developing or maintaining specific skills to create content.

AI companies are amassing huge investments while running at a loss. Their value proposition is to replace human intelligence. Their technology is not only designed to help us get better at something, but to do the work for us. They are betting that, sooner or later, AI will become essential to so many activities that we will all be willing to pay for it.

Another thing we can infer from the current state of AI is that it is designed to be used in isolation. This is not completely new. We saw social media platforms being built in much the same way. With AI, every conversation happens between the user and the model. Everyone uses their own personalised account and, because of how these models work, gets a slightly different answer.

What incentives are left to communicate with others, now that AIs are meant to have all the answers we need? If we believe the marketing claims, not many. There’s no limit to how many agents we can run in parallel, so many brave people can now become lone wolves, seeking personal success with low effort. We won’t need to rely on colleagues, teachers, mentors, friends, or experts for ideas and help. AI can provide both for us. Communicating with other humans might be seen as a time sink, as friction that slows us down from getting what we want as fast as possible.

A conversation with an AI is in theory like having a conversation with most of the knowledge that humanity has accumulated throughout history thanks to human collaboration. The combination of science, discoveries, books, art, customs and traditions, religions, cultures, digitised and loaded into a large neural network. Paradoxically, this knowledge is now offered into a boxed format, to be consumed individually, in isolation.

We’ve determined that two forces are at play: people are outsourcing their creativity and their ability to express themselves to algorithms, and they have less reasons to talk to each other. Combined, these two forces will soon make it even harder to connect with other humans. We will spend most of our time talking to AIs in isolation. Similarly to the protagonist in Her.

This will mostly happen if we don’t actively try to keep real communication in place. We can do that by writing things ourselves, by talking to people, and by expressing our thoughts using only our own words. As with everything, it’s up to us to choose what matters, but knowing the consequences can help us make smarter choices.

One tool to read them all

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Reading some of the feedback on my recent article about reading more books made me realise how much the tools we use influence the way we read. One observation in the article was about replacing the time spent on your phone with a book and making your phone look boring to help you do that. It’s easy to pick up a phone and scroll, so it should be easy to use it to read more. So why don’t people use it to read books? Because a phone is a pocket computer designed to distract users, a book is a boring technology designed to focus their attention.

I’m satisfied with the tools I have for reading books. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for reading online. After all these years, I still haven’t found a single tool that brings together content discovery, following, reading, and exploring a website’s archive.

My wish for a perfect online reading experience starts with discovering content. I want to find interesting material to read, and since time is always limited, I want it to be filtered according to my interests and ranked in a transparent way that I can directly influence. Then, when I find a good article, I want a good interface to consume it. Since the reading experience varies from one website to another, I want a clean interface designed to keep me focused. I also want to be able to highlight passages and take notes, to help me remember and make reading more rewarding. I’d like a way to keep track of the blogs I follow and get notified when they publish new content. Lastly, I want a tool that treats older content as relevant as newer content. A tool that doesn’t force me to prioritise the latest article.

This last point is really important to me, since I haven’t found anything yet that tries to solve this problem. Relevant content can be found in the entire archive of a blog, not just in the latest posts. Just as I reach for old books considered classics because they have stood the test of time, I often find articles published years ago still relevant. But to discover those articles, I have to rely on other people’s recommendations or hope that the website I’m visiting has an archive page. Without either, old content could stay buried forever on the web.

Most of the tools and platforms we use are designed to show content sorted by publication date, as if it has to be fresh to be worthwhile. And it’s not always an algorithmic decision. Often, it’s simply how the technology has been designed. For how I like to read, the date is just one of the factors that contributes to the value of an article. In some fields, I might prioritise recent content. In others, I’d prefer something that has remained relevant for years, since time can be a sign that an idea has held up. I would like a boring technology that makes reading online a more focused activity, where content is valuable regardless of its novelty. A tool that doesn’t force design decisions or hide content behind algorithmic selection.

Discovery

The most common solution to fix the discoverability problem is the feed. It’s the algorithm that decides what content users see on the social media platforms. It helps people find information relevant to their interests and tailor the platform to their needs. The issue is that users have no control over the algorithms. They don’t know why certain content is shown to them, and they cannot directly influence the choice.

One system I’ve found effective is link aggregators, because they rely on simpler algorithms and usually have a clear interface. I mostly use Hacker News to find new blogs and relevant content in the tech fields. The most interesting articles are ranked daily by the community, where I can contribute directly with my votes and join discussions using the comment system. But when I have to find content unrelated to technology, I don’t have a valid alternative. I have to resort to social-media, video platforms, search engines, hoping that they will do a good job at choosing what I’m looking for.

Following

The concept of feeds was already used to deliver content before social media. RSS feeds have been used to follow websites and blogs since the 2000s. Users can subscribe to a website by adding its feed to an RSS reader and get notified whenever something new is published. The main distinction from social media algorithms is that RSS feeds are not a content discovery mechanism, but a subscription system. Users control which publications they subscribe to, rather than relying on algorithms controlled by platforms.

What I like about RSS is that it keeps track of the blogs I follow, but beyond that the experience is inconsistent: some feeds contain full articles, others only previews, some include years of archives, and others just the most recent posts. On top of that, RSS readers are designed to prioritise new content, emphasising unread counts and showing the newest articles first. Using RSS feeds might free us from the algorithms, but not from the persistent feeling that we need to keep up with whatever is new.

RSS apps let users read articles without distractions. But in doing so, readers may never visit the authors’ websites. They might miss features not available in the RSS reader, and their visits might not count for the website’s analytics. Over time, this can end up giving authors less incentive to improve the reading experience on their websites.

Reading

To improve my reading experience, I rely on read-it-later apps. Instapaper is my favourite so far. It offers a clean and consistent interface across different websites, with useful features like highlights and notes. I’ve saved hundreds of articles over the years, and it’s quite handy to save an article on the desktop and read it later on the tablet or the phone. It works by grabbing the page I’m visiting right now, so if I can read it, Instapaper can likely read it too. The problem is that it does not contribute to content discovery, or following either, since it doesn’t track updates or notify me when new content appears, or help me find more content.

Centralised platforms

Some startups tried to address all the challenges together, creating publishing platforms on the web. One example is Substack, which offers most of the tools needed to write, to read, to find content and even allows users to escape the algorithmic feed trap with personalised newsletters. That said, the price that readers and writers have to pay for the platform is giving up control over the space where they put the content.

If all online content gets centralised on a single platform, users will become dependent on it, having to accept whatever product decisions the company might make. There would also be less individuality than there is on the small web, where bloggers and passionate people customise their own websites, potentially controlling every single detail of them. Finally, the incentives these platforms create still push authors to constantly produce new content rather than focus on creating something refined and durable. They still have algorithmic feeds and email marketing that make new content more important by design.

For now, my online reading remains scattered through many apps and platforms. However, I imagined a solution that has the potential to unify a few of the components of reading online discussed above. It does not have to be another platform or app, but rather something that we all already use to access the internet; the browser.

Centralised platforms tried to solve the integration problem by putting all the content into a single interconnected system, which is exactly what the web already does. And the web also already partially solved content discovery, since search engines, social media, recommendation platforms and link aggregators are already playing a part. The solution in this case is not to look at the web itself, but observe the problem one layer up. It has to live in the interface we use to access the web. The browser is the layer that sits between readers and independent websites. Modern browsers render pages perfectly, integrate bookmarks, can grab RSS instantly, and most of them already integrate a reading mode for articles. Connecting these components together is the key to creating a perfect tool to read online, without removing the website itself from the experience. A browser could let me follow a website directly, notify me when it publishes something new, give me a clean place to read it, and let me browse the entire archive without treating the newest articles as inherently more important.

We saw a recent wave of new browsers that mostly offered UI makeovers on top of existing engines (Blink and Webkit). Maybe a differentiator for the next browser, instead of improving usability or privacy, might be to help people to follow and read more valuable content online.

Curious to hear your thoughts.

Confessions of an emigrant

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today at 3 pm I officially became an Australian citizen. I felt it was a formality, since I already had a permanent residency. But when I was sitting in the city hall, together with others that were receiving the citizenship as well, I reflected about the last few years I spent abroad and what it actually means being an emigrant. Looking back at my past, it seemed obvious that, sooner or later, I would have moved to another country.

It all started in the early years of my adulthood, when I had the chance to fly to and work in Silicon Valley three times. During that period, I also moved to Turin to study at the university, in a much bigger city than the small town where I grew up. Something started changing in me back then. I appreciated the new level of freedom that I gained by leaving my parents' house, and I developed a certain thirst for what I believed the rest of the world had to offer. The thought of a future in my small town, seeing the same places, facing the same issues, having my entire family around all the time, and the feeling that certain things there were too slow to change, was frightening me. I didn’t want to feel stuck in that place.

Also I wanted to be challenged, I wanted to confront difficulties and experience new surroundings. I believe there are few experiences as eye-opening as living for months, or even better, years, in another country.

I wasn't sure where or how I would move, but I knew I could find a way if I truly wanted to. On Facebook I can still see the groups I joined at the time to get a genuine, unspoiled insight into what life was like in different cities: “Italians in London”, “Italians in Valencia”, “Italians in Berkeley”, “Italians in Amsterdam”, “Italians in Dublin”. I was naive. I was trying to find something familiar that would soften the culture shock I knew would hit me once I stepped out of my comfort zone. I was trying to play it safe, not knowing what to expect.

In those Facebook groups I still see many compatriots every day who ask what life is like there, how much it costs to live, whether there are enough jobs, and whether it's worth moving their entire family to the other side of the world. I can see my younger self in their worries and their hope for a different future. They don’t know yet what emigrating really means.

What I also find in those groups is the constant clash between those who defend their home country and those who criticise it, praising how much better their lives abroad are. This might seem like a typical social media interaction, but I think there's another side to the story that people are overlooking. When you move abroad, you're expected to do better, to build a better life. Otherwise, why would you do it?

It's a sort of unspoken expectation that every emigrant has to live up to, especially when interacting with people from back home. You don't move abroad to live a life worse than the one you had at home. You have to “make it”, whatever that means. You can't really talk about your struggles, the loneliness, the career setbacks, the sense of cultural isolation. Is not that simple to say that you miss what you left behind. Many emigrants end up hiding the reality of life abroad. They wear a mask to live up to the expectations of their family, friends, and the compatriots they left behind. They no longer live at home, they abandoned the land. The everyday problems of their compatriots are no longer theirs. They are in a liminal space between two countries, no longer physically present in one, but not yet belonging to the other.

The truth is that life abroad is never easy, nor is it necessarily better than what we had at home. The job situation can be a rollercoaster. It wasn't easy to tell my parents that I was picking fruit when, just a few months earlier, I had a high paying office job. It took me a while to get back to my original career, and in the meantime I had to work in less pleasant jobs where I was overqualified or overworked. I had to fill those gaps on my CV with something, because recruiters don’t care about immigration policies. Australia is a welcoming country, and its people are kind and generally open-minded, but I still feel like an immigrant every day. I had to adjust how I speak and behave, and I’m still working on softening my accent in order to fit in. I still carry the contradiction of being someone who “made it” back home while still being perpetually viewed as an outsider in my new country.

I have missed important moments in the lives of the people I care about. My sister had a child, and I am not there to watch my nephew grow up. My school friends are getting married, and I’m not there to celebrate with them. I will not share some of their happiest moments, and they will not share mine. One day, my parents might fall seriously ill, and I might not be there when they need me most. These are costs I had to be willing to accept.

The culture that shaped my childhood cannot be found overseas. I can join a small community of expatriates, buy imported products and spend time cooking a nice meal. I can find book in my language, teach my kids Italian while we visit my relatives. But I know it will be hard to transmit the same culture. Whatever home was for me cannot be bought online or shipped overseas in boxes. If I want to feel it again, I have to go back to it.

I've had the opportunity to meet several emigrants in my life, mostly Italians like me, because we tend to gravitate towards one another, as if our shared culture acted like a magnet. Some of them returned to Italy after years of living overseas because they never found a reason strong enough to stay. Some of them kept moving from country to country before eventually returning to Italy when the right opportunity arose. Some people built a life abroad, advancing their careers and starting a family, while others are still trying to figure out where they belong. It's impossible to predict what life abroad will be like for someone else, or how well they'll cope with its challenges.

After all this, one last confession, one that's usually hard for an immigrant to admit. No matter how successful you become, how much money you make, or how much your life improves by moving overseas, there will always be moments when you feel a sense of regret, when you'll be tempted to reply to those people on Facebook and tell them, “No. Don’t leave. It’s not worth it.” Then those moments pass, and life goes back to normal. They are simply part of choosing one life over another.

Today, becoming an Australian citizen made that choice feel more permanent than ever. I don't know whether Australia will ever feel like home in exactly the same way Italy does, and perhaps it doesn't have to.

And now it's time for me to celebrate. For the occasion, I'll have a chicken parmi with gravy. Wish me luck.

How to read more books

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I've read roughly a book a week for a few years, and I can tell you it's doable. I didn't always read this much. When I started, I read fewer than ten volumes per year, but making it a goal made me switch gears and achieve what I once thought was impossible. I want to explain what I did to become a prolific reader, and what I learned in the process, so that, with a bit of effort, you can do it too. I promise, it will be worth it.

First of all, you don't have to make time to read. What you need to do is read every single time you are not doing something else. In today's world, most people pick up their phones as soon as they get a moment of inactivity. Serious readers pick up their books instead. So an effective way is to replace the time you spend in front of a screen, like PCs, smartphones, and TVs, with time spent reading a book.

This is probably the most difficult part. I had to remove all social media and streaming apps from my iPhone. I removed Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc. When I started, I found myself picking up the phone and immediately noticing that something was missing, since the only things left to do were to check the weather and read boring emails. After a few days my brain started remapping itself, and I felt less pressure to immediately reach for my phone as soon as I had nothing to do. I also wear a cheap analogue watch so I can check the time on my wrist and I don't have to reach for my phone.

Once you remove these distractions from your smartphone, you might find yourself a bit uncomfortable with having nothing to occupy your mind for ten minutes. This is the perfect time to boost your reading habit. You need to make sure you always have a book with you everywhere you go. I usually read a few pages as soon as I wake up, and do the same before falling asleep. I read while cooking lunch or dinner, or while eating breakfast. I love using public transport, especially trains, because I get time to read while someone else is driving for me.[^1] I always have a book with me when I go out with my partner, even if I don't usually end up reading it. If she has to run an errand and I have to wait, I don't waste time with nothing to read. I have become good at walking my dog while reading — I even got complimented for that by a stranger — and I make sure I never go to the bathroom without a book.

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.” — Umberto Eco

Carrying a book wherever I go can become problematic, depending on its size. The best solution I have found is to use an ebook reader. They are thin devices that can fit in a pocket and are able to store hundreds of books. For a reader, an ebook reader might be one of the best inventions ever, considering how expensive books have been throughout history and how difficult they have always been to carry around. Ebooks, by contrast, are cheap. Moreover, you can have a backlight for reading in the dark — it doesn't strain the eyes — and you can highlight text, take notes and get definitions for words. However, it's not really a replacement for a book. After a while, always reading on an ebook reader feels like reading the same book, even if the story changes. I like to alternate digital books and physical ones, and I always prefer paperbacks since they are easier to carry around and cheaper to buy.

I tend to read multiple books at the same time, since having only a single option can be boring. Sometimes I get so into a book that I put the others on pause because the story is taking up all my attention, but in general I like to have a few books that I read in parallel. I generally mix fiction and non-fiction to have a broader choice.

What to read is a difficult question. I once read a phrase somewhere that puts it quite well: “read what you like until you like to read.” My suggestion is to read broadly, changing genres and subjects, because there are well-written books in every genre. Varying the topics can expose you to different perspectives. And sooner or later, you will understand which genres you like more.

“It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.” — Umberto Eco

Another secret is to not be scared of quitting books. I definitely start way more books than I finish. But I don't consider an unfinished book a failure or a bad book. I think that certain books require the right time to be fully appreciated. So if I don't finish a book today, I might try reading it again in the future. I still remember having abandoned Siddhartha by Herman Hesse at least three times after the first few pages, before finally finishing it and considering it one of the most formative books of my life. Somehow I wasn't ready for it the first time, and I had to wait for the right moment to fully understand it. Also, I believe there are way more bad books out there than good books. If you feel that you are not enjoying a book, it feels boring and makes you think you are wasting your time, just close it and move on. I have closed books by authors that I loved, because they weren't as good as the rest of their work.

If you are a serious reader, you need a library with physical books. So try to stack copies of books on your shelves for later. When I buy new books, it is mostly because I need a specific one I cannot find otherwise, or because I want to support local independent bookshops. However, I generally buy more used books than new ones. I usually find them in the book section of used stores, at markets, book fairs, and sometimes in the book boxes that I find around the city.[^2]

An effective method to push yourself to read more is to set some goals. You can pick a reasonable number of books for the month or the year and try to reach it. Tracking progress is a well-known trick used to form new habits. Goodreads, for example, has what's called the Reading Challenge, which helps you keep track of how many books you read in a year. I found it motivating to put in the effort to stay on track with the number I wanted to read. However, counting the volumes is not a healthy way of reading. It's much better to read great books and take the right amount of time to understand and reflect on them rather than rushing to finish books just to increase the final count. You need to enjoy the process and get a good outcome from your reading.

Writing a review is also a great method to make a book stick in your memory. Taking highlights and notes while you're reading is a good thing, but revisiting them alongside your thoughts in a written document is something different. Reviewing books is a great way to become better at understanding what the messages contained in the books are and what the key elements of the story are. In addition, if you like writing, it's a good reason to practise.

One of the duties of a serious reader is to find what to read next. I always have a long list of books to read, but I don't stick to it all the time. I like to be immersed in something new and discover new authors or genres. I usually use two things: Goodreads and YouTube. The first one helps me form an idea of a book before I get to reading it, thanks to reviews and comments from people I follow. YouTube, on the other hand, is great for listening to book reviews to get recommendations. There are many great channels out there, and I watch quite a few of them. One of my favourites in English is Better Than Food, which has reviewed books for more than a decade.

What inspired me to try to read more was this video, where Max Joseph explains that becoming a serial reader is just a matter of making a daily habit of reading a few pages, with surprisingly good results. Also, Ryan Holiday — a famous author — has recently published a good guide on how to read more books with his own tips and tricks.

One last recommendation: avoid hacks. Avoid speed reading. And don't try to force yourself to increase your reading speed. It will come naturally the more you read. Avoid summaries and summary services. It might be okay to use them after you read a book to make sure you didn't miss some parts, but reading a summary does not equal reading a book. Avoid audiobooks too. Big corporations want to grab your attention by trying to market audiobooks as books for busy people, but don't fall into the trap. A book is just boring black text on a white page because that's how it's meant to be consumed, and it requires your full attention. Listening to audio while cooking or cleaning or whatever you do is not the same thing; you are not fully focused on the content. Also, reading is faster than listening, so use your time wisely.

[^1]: I consider driving a huge waste of time. Sometimes it can be fun and adventurous, but I think life is too short to drive to work every day. [^2]: In Australia, some people put a wooden box with a door in their front yard and fill it with books, so that everyone passing by can pick one up or leave their own books for other readers.

Blog engines I've used

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Since I got my first internet connection as a kid, I’ve spent more time setting up new blogs than actually writing them. It’s not surprising. Configuring the platform and adding features was the whole point, the fun part. Writing never interested me at the time, perhaps because I never felt the urgency to express myself and didn’t have anything relevant to say.

I’ve always used self-hosted solutions and learned the advantages and tradeoffs of using them, so I will summarise here each blog and platform I have used. I might not know much about writing a blog, but I’m sure I know a thing or two about the platforms that make a blog possible.

WordPress

This was the first blog I opened many years ago, and I believe I wrote it in Italian. I was mostly translating some guides from English, or reposting tutorials taken from other blogs or forums. I got a few readers and comments, but it was never a serious project.

WordPress has been the main CMS for a lot of websites for decades, and still today power 40% of the web. In 2006-2008 the community around it was active, and a lot of plugins and themes were released, since PHP, the language that WordPress uses, it’s easy to learn and quick to be productive with. Plenty of guides were available, so creating a blog at the time was a matter of installing WordPress, connecting to the hosting space via FTP using FileZilla, and then connecting a MySQL database to it.

In those years, the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) was the foundational architecture used by most websites and communities, so it wasn’t surprising that WordPress got so much traction. There were so many plugins and themes that it didn’t take much to put a decent website online. Besides my own blog, I had to install and configure WordPress websites for other people, and every time things went smoothly enough. Even when I had to do some small customisations to a theme, it was quite quick to do, considering that I never learned PHP and my changes were done by guessing and testing.

The CMS that WordPress offers is top notch; I’ve never found one as good since. The editor is decent and includes an instant preview of the articles and theme changes. It’s so easy to use that even your noob uncle who needed a website was able to put one together with images without having to call you over for help.

Also, the plugin library that WordPress offers is large, and the plugin quality is quite decent. Most website owners at the time were worried about SEO, and it was just a matter of installing the right plugins to make sure the website was picked up by Google with the right keywords.

Since WordPress workes with a database, it offers simple integration to add comments to a website, with the Akismet spam filter plugin and other nice features like user login and Gravatar integration.

The main problem with WordPress is that by supporting so many features it became a huge monster, far more than what’s really needed for a simple blog. I started abandoning WordPress when Markdown became popular and static websites had their Renaissance.

Jekyll

After PHP came the Ruby era in 2008. Tom Preston-Werner, after releasing GitHub (written in Ruby) in April, got tired of having to deal with a database in WordPress to host a simple blog and decided to write a new blog engine called Jekyll, also in Ruby.

Jekyll is much simpler to configure and to understand what is happening inside the blog. A new project consists of a configuration file and a folder structure. Posts are simple Markdown files, and the styles use SASS, which at the time was more advanced than plain CSS. The pages are composed of layouts and smaller reusable components. For rendering the pages, Jekyll uses the Liquid template engine, which allow the use of variables, conditionals, and loops alongside normal HTML tags. When my blog was ready to be served, I just needed to run the CLI command to build the project, and the compiled website was saved into the output directory.

Jekyll is a platform that mostly targets blogs. There are many plugins available that extended what is possible to put into posts and how the content is indexed. Plus, GitHub got popular and enabled the possibility to host a website directly on their platform. So publishing with Jekyll is a matter of pushing the updates to the repo, and the continuous integration would then run the build and serve the output directory.

Jekyll served my needs for a longer period than any other platform. It was minimalist compared to WordPress and, in a way, made the components of a blog much more visible and in the hands of the developers, since most files were HTML, Markdown, and SCSS.

Then Ruby lost its momentum and got a bit out of fashion. I have to admit that at the time I didn’t know Ruby well, and a few times when I wanted to change some plugins I ended up not doing it because of the language barrier. I didn’t abandon Jekyll because of that, but because the community itself got a bit smaller and less vibrant, probably because a part of it migrated to other platforms (or stopped blogging).

Org mode publish

When I learned Emacs, I discovered the most advanced file format integration with an editor: org. If you don’t know it, think of it as a more powerful Markdown with a series of shortcuts and extensions that make editing really fast and transform a directory of files into a perfect organisational system for your personal information.

Org comes with a publishing management system, which is a way to export a series of org files into HTML, with certain output configurations for directories and templating. It’s a static site generator that converts org files to HTML, similar to what Jekyll was doing with .md files. Once the project is configured with some Elisp code, saving a file in Emacs and running a command was enough for publishing changes to my Org-mode blog.

Since org is an advanced file format, the publishing came with some nice features too, like title links, dates, and automatic sitemap generation.

The difficulty is that org publish is more a system for converting files rather than producing a blog. So features like layouts, SASS for stylesheets, RSS feeds, a public folder for static files, they all needed a special Elisp configuration to be written and maintained.

It didn’t take me long to adapt some Elisp code to fit my project, but after making a few changes to the directory structure, every time the build was failing and I had to debug what was happening. It wasn’t ideal. Plus, features like image compression or integrating a search would have been hard to implement.

So, as usually happens with complex configurable systems, after having fun customising the whole setup, I got bored, since org publish wasn’t really what I would consider practical for a personal blog. Just my personal taste.

11ty

I finally found a static site generator written entirely in JS, so I wrote my blog in 11ty. It’s another pretty good system for creating static websites.

I found it a bit tricky to find official documentation for certain features, but I was able to integrate and customise my blog exactly how I wanted and write the plugins I needed in quite a short time.

Honestly, I don’t have much to say about 11ty. It’s a good alternative to Jekyll, and it uses Javascript, so if you know the language it becomes easy to customise. It’s actively supported and used on the web, so I recommend checking it out if you are looking for a blog platform.

What got me a bit frustrated is that I ended up having a large JS file with all the configuration required, and when I had to change some structure in my blog — for example, adding support for Italian/English translations to certain articles — the configuration file got a bit bloated.

Astro

Astro is probably the definitive static site generator I’m using today. This blog moved from 11ty to Astro without even being noticeable, and I’ve used it in a few other projects where I needed a static site generator. I’ve even tried using DecapCMS with it, so that a friend was able to write pages and add images directly by pushing to the GitHub repo, avoiding the need for a database.

Astro has pretty much all I want for a blog: asset optimisation, partial hydration with islands, advanced templating, and variable support. Also, Astro uses single-file components to define pages, so that HTML, JS, and CSS that share the same scope are placed in a single file, like Vue does. Pretty neat, and it makes the code easy to organise and reuse. It also extensible using Javascript and offers an high level of customisation and a set of libraries to integrate more features.

What I look for now

After all this, here's what I now consider essential for a blog engine:

support for Markdown, since I write everything in Obsidian
sensible defaults for common features like RSS and asset optimisation
a healthy plugin ecosystem for when I need to extend things
easy customisation

I hope Astro stays around for a long time. I'd rather not migrate again and instead spend that time on what actually matters: the writing.

On Running and Murakami

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been a runner for more than ten years. I started running a few times a week during university because it’s a sport that fits me well. It only requires a good pair of running shoes, it’s not time-consuming, and it can be done everywhere and in any season.

I’ve always been a long distance runner, and most of my runs have been around an hour long. I always find it engaging to go for a long run, where I can distract my mind from the focus of the day. This frequently helps me find new ideas and inspiration, just like I did for this article.

Recently I’ve started running every day, but for a shorter amount of time. The physical benefits remain the same. Two things made me change my habit: first, research suggests that shorter daily run are more beneficial for the well-being, reduce the risk of injuries, and allow the body to adapt gradually. Second, it takes less time. In a busy life, taking 30 minutes a day for your body and mind is not much, while one hour can become more of a burden.

The second thing I mention when I talk about running, after describing what type of runner I am, is the type of shoes. I currently run with the Wave Rider 28, which I bought from the Mizuno store in Kyoto, Japan. I’ve tried other common brands, and while there are differences for the pros, for a casual runner like me they are negligible — and Mizuno are good shoes. I chose them because they are the shoes that the writer Haruki Murakami uses.

Haruki Murakami is the most famous Japanese author alive today. He has written multiple bestsellers that have been translated into more than 50 languages worldwide and have inspired several movies. Other than being a successful author, he’s a long distance marathon runner and wrote about his experience with running in a book called “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”.

Before dedicating himself entirely to writing, Murakami ran a jazz cafe in Tokyo with his wife, where he spent his days preparing cocktails, selecting music to play, and reading books. While it might seem like an easy job, he was working for 12 hours every day while smoking almost 60 cigarettes due to stress. Then one day, while watching a local baseball match, he had the realisation that he wanted to write fiction. Against the advice of his close friends, he sold the cafe and moved to the countryside with his wife, where he could have the calm environment needed to focus. While dedicating himself to writing, thanks also to some positive feedback received for his early stories, he discovered that sitting at a table for long hours every day wasn’t good for his health. So at 33, he quit smoking and decided that he would go for a run every single morning before immersing himself in writing.

Since then, Murakami has never stopped running, participating in more than 30 marathons around the world, including ultramarathons and triathlons. In the book, he explains the entire process that transformed him from a complete beginner to a long endurance runner. His secret was running every single day, mentioning that consistency was the key to his success.

Murakami has run for most of his life and wrote novels professionally for a long time. In the book, he explains the loose correlation between the two: the fact that both are activities done in solitude and that both require, other than a bit of talent, constant training to be sustainable over a long period. Writing is not easy. It requires sitting at a table alone, immersed in a long and deep thinking flow into imagination and memory. It’s a task that requires concentration and can sometimes be so intense that it becomes exhausting.

The book mixes the two experiences that Murakami had, describing that what he learned is that the key ingredients to engage in these activities are focus, endurance, and the patience needed to persist while waiting for the results to come.

I didn't start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn't become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run-simply because I wanted to. I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change. — Haruki Murakami

In the West, we tend to associate authors with a status, almost as if they are celebrities and rockstars. In recent decades, we saw the rise of literary artistic personas that romanticised drinking, taking drugs, and burning out young. Think Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Bukowski, Bret Easton Ellis, or David Foster Wallace. They all made these themes central to their productions.

Murakami is a different kind of writer. Instead of drinking, smoking, abusing substances, and promoting an unhealthy lifestyle, he followed a strict diet, did endurance training, and committed himself to a self-imposed discipline to seriously carry out his duties. He promoted a life dedicated to running and the craft of writing, honouring his commitments while constantly training his persistence and resilience. This choice resembles the life of ancient samurais, the Japanese warriors with a high moral code and self-control. If you’ve ever been interested in Japan, you will notice that the attitude that samurais had toward their duty still persists in today’s life of Japanese salarymen. The country is famously renowned for the perfection they put into their crafts and their dedication to work, which comes from the culture of imposing strict discipline on themselves in order to challenge their own limits.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. — Haruki Murakami

There’s a quiet rebellion in choosing Murakami over Bukowski as a way of life. Our Western culture too often normalises burnout and, instead of condemning substance abuse, subtly encourages it. The power that comes from disciplining ourselves and restraining our desires in pursuit of a higher goal is what allows us to simply show up every day and do the work, whether that means running or writing. The point of these activities, in the end, is to prove to ourself that we are capable of enduring, and of moving forward, every single day.

Blogging

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the next month I will be less busy than usual, and to not get too lazy I decided to commit to publishing one article a day. The goals I’m working toward are becoming more persistent in finishing the tasks I choose to do, and improving my writing abilities, especially in English. So a post every day seems like a good excuse to practice and move towards those goals.

This challenge will definitely push me out of my comfort zone. I’m not that skilled at writing blog posts, and to be honest not even at writing in general. Also most of the writing I’ve done previously was in my native language, Italian, so a bit of English workout is waiting for me. Two other challenges are: finding interesting topics to write about every day, and my writing speed. To help me overcome the first one, being less busy will give me more time to think freely and use my imagination, plus I have a few saved article drafts that I can use. My writing speed is probably the hardest one. It directly relates to the quality of my writing, and for a beginner it’s worth spending time polishing each draft rather than writing a lot. But I'm 32, and it's time to find a faster way to improve, even if it means producing less refined content. In any case, the speed is probably where I hope to see some progress at the end of this experiment.

How will I know if this challenge has been successful? I don’t really have any metrics available other than basic web analytics. I would say that what matters the most is to commit every day and try not to go a single day without publishing. Then in a month I will be able to check the progress in the archive page and count the days I missed.

Some blogging principles

Blogging is one of the best tools that writers have. Everything can go on a blog, from cooking and cat photos, to long essays about the meaning of nearly everything. While it's comforting that nothing is off-topic, it also means I need to decide what belongs on my blog. What are my principles for writing here?

I put down a few guidelines that I want to follow:

One core idea per post. This comes naturally since a post should be an idea or an opinion condensed in a small space. The hard part is sticking to the topic and not letting the discourse go in multiple directions. Having a short amount of time will also force me to keep my ideas small — I always tend to think too big.
Be concise. This is more about the form than the content. People don’t have an infinite amount of time to spend reading a random post, so the more I can condense information while keeping a good rhythm, the better the result will be. A good technique is to quickly write a raw draft first, then do the polishing later, cutting the unnecessary and rewriting the parts that are unclear.
Keep it mine. I believe that good writing is personal, bad writing is anonymous. There are no rules for good or bad writing on a blog, but the posts I appreciate more are the ones that give a perspective, an opinion, or more in general that tell a personal story. A personal blog should be a diary, a conversation with the reader. So in my posts I will put my real thoughts, not trying to be fair or even right.
Write manually. This should be obvious, otherwise why put so much effort in it? Recent algorithms can put together a decent post and with a few tweaks I bet it can resemble something written by a human. We live in a strange time where machine-generated content is sprawling all over the web, with or without humans behind it. I see generated articles, generated comments on social media, generated images and code all over the place. I don’t like it and I don’t want to collaborate. Writing is like a muscle, it needs proper constant training to grow. Keeping a blog is a gym for the modern writer, so write it manually or don’t write it at all. Writing is one of the most effective ways to organise your thoughts in a cohesive way. Paraphrasing Paul Graham, if you delegate this process entirely to the machine, not only you never learn how to write, but you lose one of the best ways that helps you think better.
Be positive. To write angry rants, complain that everything is shit, that we deserve better without taking any action, it’s easy. It really is. But it has consequences. Look at how overexposure to media generates stress and anxiety in people and fuel anger and depression. The hard task here is to write interesting content using a positive attitude. I don’t like the forced optimism culture, too often delivered with large smiles, because I don’t feel it’s authentic, I don’t feel it really comes from a genuine place, but from the stakes involved or ideology. Instead, I like genuine positive thinking, which comes from putting content into the world with the intention of making it a little more interesting, useful, or thoughtful than before.

Enough rambling about blogging for today. A new article is already boiling. Wish me luck.

Junky - William S. Burroughs

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Junky è un libro affascinante che tratta di un tema singolare in letteratura; la vita di un dipendente dall’eroina. William Burroughs decide di raccontare in prima persona — nonostante usi uno pseudonimo — perché lui stesso è stato dipendente dalla sostanza per quasi tutta la vita. Junky è stato il suo primo successo, ed ha elevato Burroughs a capostipite della beat generation, la corrente letteraria americana di metà secolo scorso, basata su una forte ribellione artistica e sessuale accompagnata da un consumo smoderato di droghe.

La storia si svolge a metà degli anni 40 in America, ed è di fatto la biografia della dipendenza di Burroughs, anche se i fatti narrati non sono tutti totalmente reali. Cosa passa nella mente di un tossico? Come pensa? Qual’è il vocabolario che usa e quali sono le sue unità di misura? Il libro è fenomenale nel raccontare la quotidianità di un eroinomane, sempre alla ricerca della sostanza, o di soldi, sempre a fare attenzione di non esser “pizzicato” dalla polizia. Più che una successione di eventi, il racconto è un viaggio interiore. Le pagine contengono i pensieri quotidiani di un tossicodipendente accompagnati dalla cronaca minuziosa dei suoi frequenti abusi, delle astinenze e le successive ricadute.

Junky è un viaggio scandito da continui spostamenti tra città e nazioni, per sfuggire a possibili arresti, da frequenti visite ai dottori per ottenere prescrizioni per la morfina, dallo spaccio per guadagnare soldi e poter mantenere la dipendenza, ma soprattutto dal costante bisogno quotidiano di eroina. Dalle pagine traspare il vero significato della dipendenza, che prima che esser fisica è soprattutto mentale. Il pensiero di trovare la sostanza diventa il motore sia della storia che della vita di chi, come Burroughs, ne è schiavo. Tutte le pagine non parlano d’altro che di eroina, trasformando il racconto nel diario intimo di un tossico.

La dipendenza viene continuamente interrotta. Una volta al protagonista manca l’eroina, un altra volta sceglie di disintossicarsi e si rivolge a una clinica, un altra ancora finisce in cella. Ogni volta è scabroso il racconto dei dolori fisici che prova quando al suo corpo viene a mancare la dose. Parliamo di febbre, nausea, insonnia, diarrea, dolori diffusi, soprattutto alla spina dorsale, quest’ultimo chiamato in gergo “la scimmia sulla schiena” — uno dei titoli alternativi con cui in Italia è uscito il romanzo. Sono paragrafi raccapriccianti e snervanti, dove spesso il protagonista è costretto ad assumere dosi di altre sostanze per calmare i dolori e compensare lo sbilanciamento chimico. Quando Burroughs si trova in astinenza si rivolge ad altre sostanze, principalmente alcool e erba, ma anche oppiacei vari, cocaina, barbiturici, addirittura prova il peyote messicano, per riuscire a calmare il bisogno di eroina. La cosa più triste di tutte sono le continue ricadute, che perdurano fino alla fine del romanzo. Burroughs non riesce mai a smettere per più di un paio di mesi, che incontra qualcuno che gli offre una nuova dose. Lui non riesce a trattenersi, si fa, e in un attimo si ritrova intrappolato nel solito ciclo distruttivo.

I personaggi nella storia appaiono e scompaiono. Di solito sono clienti o amici che coprono un ruolo per la durata di qualche pagina, poi Burroughs si sposta, cambia città, finisce in cella, e tutto ricomincia da capo con nuovi personaggi, nuovi prezzi, ma identiche sostanze. Le persone più vicine a lui, come la moglie, vengono menzionate raramente, quasi fossero degli intoppi insignificanti davanti all’enorme soddisfazione che prova quando si inietta l’eroina. Eppure la moglie non esita a definirlo noioso e patetico quando intuisce che sta per ricadere nella dipendenza.

Infinte Burroughs nel romanzo non critica direttamente la droga, anzi promuove l’eroina a stile di vita fin dall’introduzione. Nel libro non incoraggia il lettore a farne uso, anzi sembra quasi voglia ridimensionare la propria dipendenza. Parla spesso di vari parametri, come il numero di mesi e di iniezioni quotidiane, quasi a dire che la sua non è una dipendenza tale da dover esser ritenuta grave — una tipica auto-riflessione da tossico. La critica all’eroina fuoriesce dal racconto. Non si può che provare pena per i dolori che soffre il protagonista quando è in astinenza, per la continua lotta nella ricerca di una nuova dose, per il terrore costante di essere scoperto e incarcerato per spaccio, ma più di tutto per la continua ossessione per la droga che occupa la sua mente. Per un junky l'intera vita ruota attorno all'eroina: persino il risveglio viene dominato dal bisogno della dose, senza la quale la normalità resta irraggiungibile.

The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict.

Liture, how I manage my reading notes

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Useful software often comes out of frustration. When a programmer finds themselves wondering about a tool or a library that doesn’t exist yet, they may decide to write it. At least, they know it would be useful for one user, themself, not to mention the fun of coding. In my case, I needed an easy way to navigate my ebook notes, and all I could find were subscription based services that didn’t fit my casual use. This is how Liture started.

“Readers eat books. Film eats viewers.” — The Wave in the Mind, Ursula K. Le Guin

One of the advantages of physical books is that we can write on the margins. That text filling the white space that the page offers has a name, marginalia, and it’s the old analog way to make that book copy feel ours. By writing on it we can enrich the text with our thoughts, and also highlight our favourite passages as well as the most crucial one to help us revise our reading later on. I tend to use a pencil, a ruler, and some coloured tags attached in the margin for quickly jumping to the best parts in the future.

A lot of great writers in the past have used marginalia. Some of their book copies are still preserved, online we can see photos of the annotations made by names like Herman Melville, William Blake, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac. I know that Vladimir Nabokov used to draw maps and object, since some of the original pages were printed on his posthumous book Lectures on Literature, like his annotated copy of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. David Foster Wallace became famous for his heavy use of margin annotations. Some of his copies of Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo, filled with various notes, numbers and drawings, are kept exposed at the University of Texas in Austin.

I've read far more books recently than I did a few years ago, and I do most of my readings with an ebook reader. I love printed books. I miss the feeling that touching paper gives, the visual feedback of the progress, the different style for covers and typography used for each book. I still buy physical copies and often second-hand, but I prefer to read in Italian[^1], my original language, and since I'm in Australia, far from Italian bookshops and I don’t want to pollute the planet with my hobbies, I mostly read digital books.

I also have the habit of highlighting in books and sometimes taking annotations, which it's easy using an e-reader. Soon my collection of quotes and notes had grown. For some books, like 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, I had to print my highlights to review them, filling around 15 pages, and then re-highlight the most important parts. Even if I find paper more effective for focus reading than digital text, I become frustrated every time I had to review my highlights and notes from an ebook, since I couldn't find a way to access that data.

I use a Kobo reader and all the content that the user generates is stored inside the device. Export is not officially supported. A few years ago I started maintaining a python script that extracts highlights and notes in different formats, but with a lot of notes it stopped being practical. I needed a way to search my highlights and notes, to save my favourite quotes, to see them grouped by author and book. Also highlighting as well as typing on an e-reader is not that precise, the devices are usually quite slow to respond, so I ended up having a lot of errors and imperfection to fix. I want to edit my content, and also add new notes to enrich it. I needed a new kind of software for this.

Annotations on ebooks should mimic those on physical books; they have to be easily accessible and preserved. Keeping them stored inside devices in proprietary formats is dangerous. They can easily get lost. I started thinking that some of my book notes matter as much as photos of my past, they’re a part of my reading experience and I want to keep them for the future.

Kobo, Kindle, Apple Books, none of them facilitates exporting highlights and notes outside of their own platform, no common format exists for that. That’s where Liture comes helpful. It’s a desktop app to import and manage notes and highlights from the main three book platforms. The user can search and edit content, save the favourite items, and also manually add new authors, books, and notes. No cloud or subscriptions, free for all platforms. I’m using it to keep importing new highlights every time I sync my Kobo on my mac, and the content is automatically stored in a SQLite file that I regularly backup.

“There must be something in books, something we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing.” — Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

I think there’s a lot of potential for great software for readers, and still a lot to do. Big tech companies disregard reading and prefer to focus on more lucrative content, so readers are usually left with old platforms, not frequently updated, missing modern features, and often with incompatible formats. But it's not all lost. Some groups of passionate readers are awakening and trying to fix the situation building new platforms and apps. I would like to do my part releasing Liture. Enjoy and make good use of it!

[^1]: I tell others that I prefer Italian because I find the language generally more expressive than English, but in reality it’s because I fear I might forget it one day. So I read in Italian to keep the language from rusting in my head.

Quel che resta del giorno - Kazuo Ishiguro

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

La sera è ciò che resta del giorno, come la vecchiaia è ciò che ti resta della vita. Il protagonista dell’opera di Kazuo Ishiguro uscita nel 1989, è un maggiordomo oramai anziano che decide di intraprendere un viaggio, sia fisico guidando la sua auto nelle campagne del sud-ovest dell’Inghilterra, sia nella sua memoria, ripercorrendo scene della sua carriera presso la dimora Darlington. Quel che resta del giorno è stato il primo successo dello scrittore inglese, grazie al quale vinse il Booker Prize che gli permise di esser riconosciuto a livello internazionale, anche grazie alla trasposizione cinematografica con Anthony Hopkins come attore protagonista.

Stevens interpretato da Anthony Hopkins nel 1993

Stevens è un maggiordomo a capo del servizio nella residenza di un lord inglese chiamato Darlington. Dopo la morte del padrone, la residenza omonima passa in mano a un magnate americano Mr Faraday, che nonostante i tagli del personale, necessita di buoni servitori al suo servizio. Stevens decide quindi di prendersi qualche giorno di vacanza per andare a trovare una sua conoscenza che anni prima aveva servito a Darlington hall, Miss Kenton, e convincerla a riprendere il suo vecchio ruolo. Il viaggio in auto lo porta attraverso i panorami della campagna inglese dove si trova a riflettere in una serie di flashback che raccontano episodi della sua carriera con lord Darlington. In queste memorie si intrecciano più trame, come il contesto storico del racconto, descritto tramite la partecipazione politica del lord nelle fasi preliminari della seconda guerra mondiale e la sua decisione di appoggiare l’operato della Germania, oltre che vari avvenimenti che riguardano i personaggi che soggiornano a Darlington hall.

“La sera è la parte più bella della giornata. Hai concluso una giornata di lavoro e adesso puoi sederti ed essere felice. Ecco come la vedo io. Domandate a chiunque e vedrete che vi diranno tutti la stessa cosa. La sera è la parte più bella della giornata.” — Stevens

Il racconto è in prima persona dal punto di vista del maggiordomo, un espediente utile a Ishiguro per narrare vari avvenimenti, come le cerimonie formali tra rappresentanti politici di varie nazioni che avvengono nella residenza, attraverso gli occhi — e le orecchie — di un maggiordomo. Stevens riporta solamente porzioni di conversazioni, battute di personaggi e piccoli incidenti che gli sono rimasti nella memoria, i quali vengono lasciati al lettore come pezzi di un puzzle da comporre per comprendere ciò che non viene direttamente narrato. Il nascondere gli eventi e rivelarli solo in parte durante la narrazione è uno dei tratti caratteristici dello stile di Ishiguro, che ho ritrovato anche nel suo romanzo successivo Non lasciarmi. Oltre a questa unicità, in entrambi i romanzi i protagonisti prendono parte a una storia d’amore che, sebbene ordinaria, è anche inconclusiva. Infatti anche in Quel che resta del giorno, scopriamo che i sentimenti di Miss Kenton per Stevens, in qualche modo si intuiscono dai flashback ma vengono rivelati del tutto nel finale, vengono totalmente ignorati dal maggiordomo. Stevens è profondamente convinto che esista una precisa nozione di grandezza riferita alla professione del maggiordomo. Nonostante la definizione non appaia mai univoca nel libro ma sempre frammentaria, si può ricostruire che essa consista nel reputare onorevole il servire il proprio lord al meglio delle proprie possibilità, ripudiando qualsiasi comportamento inadatto o giudizio sugli avvenimenti nella residenza, oltre che mostrandosi sempre in atteggiamento sobrio e disponibile a qualsiasi richiesta. Stevens intende chiaramente dimostrare a se stesso di poter essere un grande maggiordomo, nonostante non si reputi tale, ed è per questo che decide di non dar corda ai sentimenti di Miss Kenton, sarebbero per lui solo una distrazione inopportuna.

Le capacità narrative di Ishiguro sono eccezionali. Per esempio in una scena, di per se secondaria ma che nel contesto della storia assume un’importanza centrale, Stevens sta leggendo un libro e Miss Kenton gli si avvicina cercando di rubarglielo di mano per scoprire cosa stesse leggendo. Ella vorrebbe fare con quel gesto una qualche breccia nella barriera professionale che ancora li divide e cercare di andare oltre la formalità dei loro discorsi, sempre diretti al servizio della casa e alle nuove disposizioni da attuare. Stevens si rifiuta fermamente, invitandola molto educatamente a non violare i suoi momenti di riposo. Miss Kenton infatti scopre giocosamente che Stevens stava leggendo una banale storia d’amore, ma il maggiordomo mette subito a freno la curiosità della domestica spiegandole che per adempire al meglio al suo ruolo è richiesto leggere, anche romanzi, per poter adottare sempre il vocabolario più adatto ad ogni conversazione. La scena evocativa mostra quanto Stevens sia capace di dedicarsi al suo ruolo, al punto da reprimere i suoi sentimenti e non distinguere più la sua vita privata dal lavoro.

In entrambi i romanzi che ho letto dell’autore, mi sono ritrovato a pormi delle domande non banali. Esse emergono dalle pagine e non vengono mai poste direttamente, siccome i personaggi finiscono per ritrovarsi in situazioni ambigue e moralmente complesse. È una delle specialità dello stile narrativo di Kazuo Ishiguro. Mentre in Non lasciarmi mi ero posto domande sui quali debbano essere i limiti della scienza, in questo libro è impossibile non domandarsi quali siano i limiti nella dedizione al proprio lavoro. Non si tratta di puro stacanovismo, ma piuttosto di chiedersi la fede incondizionata che ha Stevens per il proprio padrone, al punto da sopprimere qualsiasi dubbio, giudizio o addirittura sentimento perché in contrasto con i requisiti per essere un grande maggiordomo, sia giustificata. Più di trent’anni dall’uscita del libro, è ovvio che quel tipo di mentalità è oramai antiquata, allo stesso modo di tutte le riflessioni che Stevens fa a favore di lasciare le decisioni fondamentali per il futuro del paese ad un gruppo di leader, perché a suo dire loro sanno quello che fanno meglio di chiunque altro. Da queste riflessioni emergono le differenze tra il vecchio modo di pensare di inizio secolo scorso, in cui si credeva che un uomo avesse un ruolo assegnatogli nella società e l’unica cosa che dovesse fare e svolgerlo al meglio, senza occuparsi di faccende complesse fuori dalla sua portata, in contrasto con l’uomo moderno, che da importanza all’educazione personale, e si sente libero sia di scegliere la propria strada nella vita, sia di poter esprimere opinioni e preferenze su eventi e decisioni che non lo riguardano direttamente. Miss Kenton nel racconto la pensa diversamente da Stevens, non crede che il suo ruolo definisca la sua intera vita. Sceglie l’unica via liberatoria che ha a disposizione, e decide di sposarsi, provando a costruirsi una famiglia, e smettendo così di essere alle dipendenze altrui. Anche se le cose alla fine non le sono andate per il meglio, ha scelto di esercitare la sua libertà provando a crearsi una vita diversa, rinunciando a dedicare tutta se stessa al ruolo di domestica. Stevens nel finale si rende conto di aver sprecato gran parte della sua vita inseguendo un ideale inconclusivo, e ha il rimpianto di non aver scelto per se un’altra strada per evitare la solitudine alla fine dei suoi giorni.

Leggendo alcune interviste sul romanzo, Ishiguro ha dichiarato essersi documentato a dovere e di aver addirittura letto dei manuali inglesi sui maggiordomi di inizio secolo, che spiegavano le procedure corrette per organizzare il servizio e intrattenere gli ospiti. Dopo mesi di ricerca l’autore ha prodotto la prima bozza del romanzo in un solo mese, chiudendosi in nel suo studio a scrivere anche per tredici ore al giorno, per ridurre al minimo qualsiasi influenza esterna sulla sua immaginazione e concentrarsi solamente sulla scrittura della storia che aveva in mente. Durante questa immersione nel processo creativo, Ishiguro ha detto di aver appositamente evitato di riscrivere o correggere le bozze, ma solo di essersi annotato le successive modifiche da apportare una volta concluso l’intero racconto. Mi vien da pensare che Ishiguro, oltre che a costringere se stesso a scrivere, volesse tentare di avvicinarsi il più possibile alla quella dedizione assoluta al proprio lavoro descritta nel romanzo, così da caratterizzare al meglio Stevens tramite le sensazioni che provava durante tutte quelle ore di intensa produzione.