A psychiatrist, one of the good guys, might be able to help and provide an explanation. Because at a certain point the irresistible impulse is triggered to use a small knife, a nail, or a pointed object to engrave your own name, perhaps that of your partner, the dates of your birth or encounter, on a monument, the canvas of a painting, a precious one Object? What satisfaction comes from scarring them? Does it feel smarter and freer to pull off such a stupid feat?
A few days ago, a young Bulgarian living in London, Ivan Danailov, engraved his name and that of his fiancee in the Colosseum; he justifies himself in the silliest way: “I didn’t know it was an ancient monument” (modern, right?). Danailov has now been emulated by a brainless 17-year-old Swiss tourist: immortalized on video as he carves the first letter of his name into one of the Colosseum’s plinths. Unconsciousness of “today’s youth”? It is an unconscious barbarism that has no age.
Timeless nonsense. This passion for scarring monuments, which also infected Michelangelo and Raphael
by Silvia Renda
November 4, 1979: In his “Dictionary” column in the Corriere della Sera, Leonardo Sciascia offers his readers a “voice” entitled “Thompson”. Remember an anecdote from Gustave Flaubert. The great French writer travels to Egypt and “finds with horror that a man, indeed Thompson, had the bright idea of engraving his name on a Roman column; and he writes to a friend about it: “Stupidity is something you can’t shake off; Nothing attacks it without destroying it. It has the texture of granite, is hard and durable. In Alexandria, a certain Thompson wrote his name in letters six feet high on the Pillar of Pompey… There is no way of looking at the Pillar without seeing Thompson’s name, and consequently without thinking of Thompson. The cretin has integrated himself into the monument and makes himself eternal life with it.
Sciascia comments: “The existence of a cretin of this type is not accidental and sporadic: it is a large, inexhaustible category and, seriously, in good health… It seems to me that there is no doubt in the identification and definition of this human type insists that With this category, this kind of stupidity, Flaubert wanted to go beyond the Thompsons, who carve their names on famous monuments and deface them, and that he wanted to allude to those who write their names. He said of the Thompson who had engraved his name on the pillar, but in all likelihood he was thinking of the Thompson who were trying – not the stone that made them groan, but the printing presses – to put their name on Flaubert’s work to write. In his despicable stupidity, however, he failed to see its pathetic side, its ultimately positive meaning: that the only way to worship intelligence was for stupidity to attack it.
During his life Sciascia met many Thompson, idiots, against many he had to defend himself: they attacked him because of the positions that the writer gradually assumed; but above all because they too gained a crumb of fame with this controversy in the shadow of Sciascia: this was in many cases the real reason for the “scar”. There are many Thompsons; They have always been there, but nowadays it seems to be more: Unfortunately, her mother is always pregnant; sometimes, like the Bulgarians and the Swiss, they rage against the defenseless Coliseum and other famous monuments. This is how they want to perpetuate themselves. Not just once, but a thousand times idiots.