Clu - Milan

Dear Reality

2,500 university students at the Palalido stadium–not for a concert or a sports event, but to begin the academic year in search of a living fact. The testimony of two students and a teacher

by ANNA LEONARDI

“We don’t want to waste time shut up in Big Brother’s house.” The cry of rebellion that concludes the invitation flyer for the Milan university group’s Beginning Day was not betrayed. Reality, only reality. It is reality that prevails here. This is the spur for the 2,500 young people who left the classrooms of Milan’s universities on Thursday afternoon, October 12th, to crowd into the Palalido in Milan. The words “A Living Fact” on a banner stretching across the auditorium are the backdrop for the three people who gave their testimonies: Emanuele, better known as Lele, 24 years old, a classics student at the state university; Giovanni, also 24, in his last year of medical school; and Giorgio Vittadini, professor at the university of Milan-Bicocca.

A passion for details

The academic year is already in full swing. Many students have already felt the thrill of sitting in front of the professor for an exam. When one begins (again), one always asks why, why face life every day. “It is the desire for truth,” Lele begins, “that makes us move about in reality like ‘a bold swimmer in the ocean.’ But today it is difficult to live like this. Circumstances seem to dictate the opposite, they lead us in some way to yield to nothingness. Our friend who taught surgery, Enzo Piccinini–who died a little more than a year ago–told us about the time when he started his lesson with the unexpected question, ‘Why are you studying medicine?’ Some students attempted an answer, but the majority of them were mumbling in protest. When Enzo asked what was the matter, a girl jumped up, saying, ‘Excuse me, Professor, but we’re here for class, not for philosophizing. So please drop this kind of question.’ We go forward practically from inertia.” But the problem is not an instinctive weakness; it is as though a plan for atrophying desire existed–a plan that it is not hard to trace in the pages of the newspapers, in the recipes proposed by the intellectuals of the moment. “Alberoni offers the first rule for happiness: don’t look for it,” Lele goes on, giving an encapsulated news review. “For Bobbio, our permanent condition is that of methodical doubt. And Severino teaches that the truth is an unreachable mirage for our time. Reality becomes a game, and who we are–our passions, desires, sufferings, friendships–has the dignity of a fairy tale.” In the impact with something that happens there lies the chance for a recovery, for a tenacious affirmation of man’s originality: “The university, as I live it, represents a possibility for this impact, an occasion for letting oneself be hit by reality. I started out from a detail: a passion for ancient history. But going more deeply into a detail is healthy and useful; that is, it produces knowledge, when it is an attempt to discover the truth, to find an answer to the question of the meaning of things. Studying becomes a dignified activity, not an obsession or a mania for detail. But to progress like this you need teachers. And a teacher (I am thinking of some of my professors) is someone who throws light on the connection between each detail and the whole. It is not in the silence of thought that the truth is discovered, but it is more useful and more human to be open to everything that happens, to fascinating encounters. For this reason, I can speak today of friendship.”

In the operating room

Since the beginning of this year, Giovanni has begun to take his first steps in the operating room–a reality, we all know, that is a hard one, or as he says, “rotten.” “I didn’t feel comfortable in that environment,” he recounts. “Every morning I would get up and I would not want to go there. I even got to the point one morning of hoping that I would have a flat tire so as to have an excuse. In a word, I was unhappy in the hospital, and it would ruin my whole day. I was unhappy with my life and I wasn’t telling anybody.” Then one day he received a call on his cell phone. It was from his friend Mondo in Bologna who was asking how his exams had gone. Giovanni grabbed the chance and in a few words told him about his problems. After a minute the phone’s display lit up again: “Give the maximum and offer everything,” was Mondo’s answer. “He didn’t say much to me,” Giovanni comments as he tells the story, “but the whole question changed. He set me in front of what I had to do, in a different way. Things don’t change because of a plan imposed on reality. The only thing that changes reality is a miracle, something that happens to you… a friend of yours who sends you a short message. I understood that the only position I could take was the position of questioning. My problem was not that I didn’t have friends in Milan, so that the only one who could give me a hand was Mondo in Bologna; my problem was that I did not say anything to anybody.” Being simple is the key. “My father, the other evening at dinner, told me the story of when he asked Father Giussani what it meant to be simple: ‘Being simple means being decisive,’ was the answer. Being simple, in my case, meant acknowledging that I was not alone, acknowledging relationships, being decisive, entering into things.”
All of human yearning is sustained and saved. How can we remain unmoved at hearing the words of Chopin recalled by Giovanni: “Sadness has overcome me, because not even music consoles me today. It is already late at night and I do not yet want to sleep. I don’t know what I am missing and I am already more than 20 years old.”
“I too am more than 20 years old,” Giovanni concludes, “but I am certain that what keeps me from lowering my aim is a friendship that reminds me that I do what I have to do for Someone; a friendship that makes more familiar to me this ‘Someone,’ Jesus Christ.”

From Leopardi to Statistics

Professor of Statistics Giorgio Vittadini summed up, in a few minutes, twenty-five years of university life. “I studied Economics at the Catholic University in Milan from 1974 to 1980. Father Giussani was teaching Theology there then, and I cannot think about those years without remembering the impact with that personality and, by rebound, with all the people around him. This was my university experience: the discovery of my human desire, and from that my passion for study, friendship, life, and judging everything that happened around me. We would read Leopardi, Pavese, and Péguy; we would listen to Beethoven and Chopin; we would go to meet the leading cultural and political figures, becoming friends with Testori and Brandirali. Cultural centers were created, as well as film groups (some of us even went to Denmark looking for the film Dies Irae) and Supermilano radio. Within this experience, in the presence of these men, the idea came to me to stay in the university; my university career arose from this.” But things didn’t go exactly as he had imagined they would. He changed his field of study from Political Economy to Statistics and changed from the Catholic to the State university. “I thought it would be a great ride,” Vittadini confided to the young people in the Palalido, “but instead I found myself in a dark room on the third floor of the Institute of Political Science, with the professor checking to make sure I arrived on time. They put a statistics textbook written in English in my hand, and I started learning all those abstruse formulas…. Every line was deadly. I started thinking things were not working too well. I went to Giussani and said, ‘I’ve made a mistake; this is not the path for me.’ He replied, ‘Look, I understand that you have doubts that what you are doing is useful, because you don’t know if you will make it, because you don’t like it. But try, when you are there bending over your book, to offer what you are studying for Jesus, for the good of the world. Offer it, because in this way it will be useful.” He did not convince me, but I started doing it. And here I came to the first milestone on my journey. Obedience is not simply doing something that someone else tells you to do. You have to involve your own freedom in obedience, you have to take responsibility for the consequences of what you do. You have to say ‘yes,’ not only to those who tell you what to do, but to the reality into which you throw yourself. In this way, the ‘yes’ you say becomes your own. Those years, with all their labor, the lack of response and return, were the beginning of this discovery.” This was followed by another discovery: “Reality attracts. Submitting for years to something that I did not feel to be mine–in terms of time, method, and people–I began to discover a strange fascination in the work of writing articles about statistics. I began to see something in my subject, which was made up of models, theorems, formulas, and letters. Reality was showing me it had a structure, a way of being. And this attempt to enter into the ganglia of being, to reveal that fraction of being which is given to me in my little piece of research, aroused a fascination in me. Reality is not an invention; you can understand that it has a meaning.”
After his personal discoveries, his career was not long in coming. Named full professor a few months ago, Vittadini took leave of the gathering of university students with these words: “Everything that has happened to me in these twenty-five years has not been like something from Vittorio Alfieri: ‘I willed, I always willed, very strongly I willed.’ How much discouragement, laziness, betrayal... how much time wasted! And it is precisely because of this that I can say that what has come to me is not mine, it is not the fruit of my hands. The most sensational thing in my personal history is the presence of an Other; it is the history of a mercy.” Of Big Brother, there is not even a shadow.