I don't understand, says your son.
After a lucky carom in the game, that strange phrase had sprung from your lips: "You can hit a stone in your teeth."
In an attempt to explain the incomprehensible, you clarify that this song is not a song, but a stone.
Yes, your sentence encourages him to hit his teeth with a piece of rock.
But why? the boy insists, like the bloodhound beginning to sniff out yet another outlandish adult occurrence.
And you, starting to lose your footing, answer that it's an old custom, strange, very strange.
Some people believed that if you were lucky, or if things turned out better than expected, you had to pay a price, sacrifice something, cause yourself pain.
I don't get it, he ditches, as he returns between laughing and fluttering wings to his amusement theater.
Perhaps due to some ancestral fear, we feel vulnerable to happiness, it is scary to even name it.
We fear a brutal reckoning: if everything smiles at us, it will be because a misfortune lurks around the corner.
The more luck, the greater disaster.
That feeling beats in the Greek story of the lucky Polycrates, tyrant of the island of Samos.
When he was at the height of his triumphs, he received a letter from Pharaoh warning him that accumulating so much success is dangerous.
I recommend that you get rid of an object that is very valuable to you: perhaps by suffering the loss of it you will be able to counteract the excess of your victories.
Frightened, Polycrates sailed in a ship, moved away from the coast and trembling threw his favorite jewel into the sea: a ring with a splendid carved emerald.
Days later, a fisherman caught a fish for the palace table and,
upon opening it, the cooks found in its guts the same ring thrown into the waves.
When the pharaoh found out, he knew that Polycrates would meet a chilling end.
Indeed, a short time later he fell into a trap and died crucified by his enemies.
That dark omen is still alive today, and we tend to believe that every moment of happiness will cost us dearly.
As he sang, por soleá, Manuel Torre from Jerez: “I'm so ruined that when I win I get angry”.
We don't treat ourselves much better if, on the contrary, unpleasantness rains down: in the face of mistakes and disappointments, remorse suffocates us or, worse still, we feel the urge to punish ourselves as penance, even going as far as self-harm.
Not surprisingly, the word "fault" seems to be related to
colpus
, in Latin "blow".
Terence premiered in ancient Rome a play entitled
Heautontimoroumenos
, which means "he who torments himself".
The protagonist of it educates his son with such severity and disciplines that the rigors cause the young man to flee.
After months without hearing from him, his father sells his house, his own clothes, his furniture, everything, and imposes a life without pleasures.
If he was rigid with his son, now he becomes rigid with himself.
This suffering character would inspire Baudelaire many centuries later an autobiographical poem in
The Flowers of Evil
: “I am the wound and the knife, the slap and the cheek!
I am the vampire of my blood."
Unrepentant pessimists, when the dark night covers us, we do not wait for the lucky break, but rather the coup de grace.
We have a surprising relationship with prosperity and misery: almost the same.
We think of expiating happiness or anguish, as if a threatening burden accompanied any turn of fortune.
Among his proposals for the new millennium, the writer Italo Calvino claimed lightness: in the face of oppressive spirals, he proposed to remove weight, sorrow and gravity.
He affirmed that, according to science, the structure of the material world is supported by very subtle entities, such as the messages of DNA, the impulses of neurons, the
quarks
, the wandering neutrinos in space since the beginning of time.
He wrote: "Take life lightly, which is not being superficial, but sliding over things from above, not having stones in your heart, loosening the knots that squeeze us."
It is better to sing than to hit us with a song in the teeth.
Birds and angels fly because they know how to take themselves lightly.
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