The word of the week is INSPIRATION (by Massimo Sebastiani)

Have you noticed that in recent times there is an expression, a typical transfer from English, that has invaded our public discourse, newspapers, talk shows, advertising? It is the use, mainly of American derivation, of the words '

 and '

. A term that, in the meaning we were used to, had almost waned, indeed heavily questioned: someone spoke openly of a false myth of inspiration. Yet for some time it seems that everything

, is a source of inspiration, from institutional figures such as

to

to a car as you can see, and hear, in a recent spot whose pay off And:

.

So also movement - that particular form of movement which is the synthesis of energy, technology and aesthetics of a car - can be a source of inspiration?

And in what sense?

Always, or rather for a few centuries, more or less

we think of inspiration as something inexplicable, sudden, romantic, basically irrational, impossible to regulate. And for this reason, inspiration is closely linked to artistic creation, seen as something brilliant, fulminating. Irreducible and therefore disconnected from the concreteness of everyday life. Much depends on the origin of the word, which has, at least up to a certain point, marked the way. It is an openly religious origin, which has to do with the irruption of the divine, that is, with the most irrational and inexplicable there is.

and we speak of

as the foundation of the texts of the

, therefore of the

. Here the texts that are considered inspired are the sacred ones, that is, those in which the word of God is placed. It is here that we speak of prophets inspired by God and the inspiration of the Almighty who makes man intelligent. The Latin word is composed of

 which means inside or above (and God is certainly above men and at the same time is able to let something enter men) and

. The result is something like

. And in fact in the Treccani dictionary the first meaning is that of the intervention of a divine spirit that determines the will of man with an obviously supernatural action. We are outside any logic, any practice, even the slightest protocol.

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The expression was therefore ready to be inherited by man to explain, without actually explaining it, the wonders of artistic creation, from literary to musical and pictorial ones.

Hence also idioms of common language such as' I got the inspiration ',' I got the inspiration of ... 'as if to say:' I don't know how it happened but suddenly I had the idea to do this or that '.

But, apart from the typically twentieth-century criticism also in the field of artistic creation, this naive and romantic vision of the creative act, which is contrasted - for those who do not believe in the false myth of inspiration - the idea of ​​constancy, of daily work, of research (which is valid just as it is for muscle training or weight loss), the progressive secularization, that is the removal and liberation from typically religious patterns and ways of thinking, has produced a result that is well summarized in a famous dialogue from

's film

, in which

, played by

, talks to the captain of the

rugby team

freed from apartheid to explain to him the symbolic meaning of a possible team victory: 'where to find inspiration for such an undertaking ?, Freeman-Mandela wonders. And the answer is: 'in the work of others', perhaps in a poem or in the example of someone who made it while not seeming particularly better than us and certainly without being a God. a car, a boy who becomes a video game champion like Hans Sama, a Paralympic athlete or the person we have close to us, can be a source of inspiration, it is natural and immediate. Before Invictus he sang it in a poignant declaration of love by Robert Plant to his wife in a famous piece by

which is entitled, simply and not surprisingly,