“The big sky”, the mountain means to look and tremble

Neither “The Big Sky” by Alberto Rollo (Ponte alle Grazie, pp. 200, euro 16) there isn’t that mountain there – the facilitating mountain in vogue, the serious mountain of truthful message, the salvific mountain, school of the good and the wise, all life lessons for use of the philosopher-like writer who, in the presence of the peaks, in feverish metaphorical suggestion, dishes up petty Epiphanies for the use of other suggestible people. There is not even the reflective postcard mountain, deliberately placed there by the God of the metaphor to kiss whoever wants to make any kind of loot. Why there is anything else. To begin with, a man from the plains, a Milanese – what we would define as a very clear point of view – who aspires to heaven through the mountain: but which mountain? A mountain “not to invert, not to crowd it with uphill time trials”. A man who imagines and lovesexposing himself to the continuous education of himself through the encounter with what escapes, in a perennial and elastic back and forth motion between childhood and maturity (the imagination, and the strength before the irredeemable hemorrhage of time), between father and father (his own, Cesare, and the one Alberto will find himself to be), between past and present (from the Limidario imagined as a boy to Valsesia decades later).