(Page 121) - It was in a bathtub back in New York, reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary, that i first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn't have picked me up out of a police lineup. But I felt glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt - this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.
I came to Italy pinched and thin. I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don't fully know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late - through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures - into somebody much more intact. The easiest, most fundamentally humans way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist more now than I did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person - the magnification of one life - is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody's but my own.
