Читать книгу The Notebook - José Saramago - Страница 43

The Rita I want to be like when I grow up is Rita Levi-Montalcini, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1984 for her research into the development of neural cells. Given that I already have a Nobel Prize, it is not with any ambition for that greater or lesser glory (opinions of those in the know are divided) that I am ready to stop being who I am in order to become Rita. Increasingly so, since I am of an age when any sort of change, however promising, always seems to be a sacrifice of the routines that we more or less all end up adopting.

So why do I want to be like Rita? It’s simple. At her investiture as a Doctor (Honoris Causa), delivering the inaugural lecture of the Complutense University in Madrid, this woman, who will be a hundred years old in April, made a few statements (a shame we weren’t able to get hold of a complete transcript of her improvised speech) that left me alternately amazed and grateful, however hard it is to imagine these two extreme feelings together and united. She said: “I have never thought about myself. Living or dying, they’re the same thing. Because naturally, life is not in this little body. What matters is the way in which we live and the message we leave behind. That is what survives us. That is immortality.” And she said too, “The obsession with aging is ridiculous. My brain is better now than it was when I was young. It’s true that I don’t see well and my hearing is even worse, but my head has always worked well. The crucial thing is always to keep the brain active, to try to help others and retain your curiosity about the world.” And these words, which made me feel as if I had found a kindred spirit: “I am against reform or any other kind of subsidy. I have survived without it. In 2001 I didn’t earn a thing and I had money problems until President Ciampi named me Senator for Life.”

Not everyone agrees with such radicalism. But I would bet that many of you reading this will also want to be like Rita when you grow up. So be it. If you do we can be sure that the world will soon change for the better. Is that not what we have been saying we want? Rita is the way to do it.