In the lecture hall of the State University of Milan it was impossible not to spot Tiziano Terzani on the fly, in that late winter morning, early spring of 2002. Tall, with long hair and beard as white as the habit he was wearing, he seemed to be the very image of the Indian holy man. However, it was enough that he began to speak and the strong Tuscan accent, indeed “very Florentine” to use one of his expressions, immediately canceled this first impression.
Only a few months had passed since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and Terzani had recently published a book that represented an authoritative voice against violence in response to violence. A book that is very topical today given the season that Europe is experiencing: "Letters against the war" (Tea, 2019, pp. 180, also e-book).
I had read in one breath those "letters", some of which were written by the war theater of Afghanistan and I found them strong from an ethical point of view: "Even more than outside, the causes of the war are within us. I am into passions such as desire, fear, insecurity, greed, pride, vanity ... We have to change our attitude. It's time to come out ; it's time to commit to the values you believe in . A civilization is strengthened with its moral determination, much more than with new weapons ”. But there was something else in those pages that struck me with equal force: the passion of man , journalist and writer in telling, describing places, people, encounters, emotions, landscapes. The passion to know without necessarily judging.
In that book , born as a pilgrimage of peace between East and West in the aftermath of the American military intervention in Afghanistan, there was the very essence of Terzani, his way of understanding the relationship with the world around him and with the "Different" from itself. Terzani had always been traveling, alone, with the simple company of a few books, but never solitary, never totally isolated and far from his surroundings. There was too much curiosity in his written pages, too much desire to know and understand, to meet, almost with a frenzy that burned inside, which made one think of a restless Terzani, depressed in the periods spent at home.
Today that Tiziano Terzani is no longer there, books like "Letters against the war" give even more the full meaning of his way of understanding the profession of journalist and correspondent , becoming a witness to the facts without the absurd claim to be super partes at all costs, nor, much less, to please everyone. Above all a book like "Letters against the war" reminds us, even in the light of contemporary conflicts, how it is necessary to understand , be convinced, believe that the only way out to hatred is non-violence .
To use the words written by Terzani more than twenty years ago: “We have to change . First of all, by no longer pretending that everything is the same, that we can continue to live a normal life cowardly. With what is happening in the world our life cannot, must not, be normal. We should be ashamed of this normality ”.