A Place in the World

Anyone living in the mountains knows that, more than landscape, they represent another way of being in the world, perceiving time, exploring space, and being closer to the other beings inhabiting them. Mountains—not “nature”, as city dwellers tend to call them—are wild and brutal but they also offer physical and spiritual refuge. In his last book, The Eight Mountains (published in Spanish as Las ocho montañas, Literatura Random House and, in Catalan, Les vuit muntanyes, Navona, 2018), Paolo Cognetti writes about his own experience, telling the story of a friendship in which the mountains are not only a backdrop but an element that profoundly marks the lives of the main characters. In this book, Cognetti calls for a way of life that allows us to rediscover ourselves as human beings in humanity’s very earliest spaces.

This conversation is one of the activities programmed for the exhibition “After the End of the World”.