The letter and advice that Umberto Eco left <x0rmanet” to your grandson before your death will make you reflect a lot about your life

Dear grandson, I would not like this Christmas letter to sound very sugary (deemicisana, term, according to author De Amicis “Zenes”) and remind you of the love of our relatives, our country, the world, or similar things. You wouldn't listen to them, and when you're putting in practice (you're older and I'm old), the value system will be so different that you can make my recommendations appear out of time.

So I'd rather stop at a single recommendation, which you'd be able to put into practice even now, while you've sunk into your iPad; but I won't make the mistake of not counseling you this, not that I would look like a forgetful, unacceptable grandfather, but that's what I do.

Most I can recommend that if you accidentally go online, you go through hundreds of porn pages that show thousands of ways the ratio between two human beings, or between a human being and an animal, try not to believe that it's sexy, even very monotonous; that's because it's about an inskem, which aims to force you not to leave home and see the real girls.

I start by the principle that you're straight, otherwise adjust my recommendations to your case. But look at the girls, at school or where you go to play, because they're better at truths than those TV women; and one day they'll give you much greater satisfaction than they are online.

Trust the one with more experience than you and if only I had seen sex on your computer, your father would never have been born, and you would have known where you were, but you wouldn't be. But it's not that, what I wanted to talk about, more than a disease that hit your generation and even that of older boys than you and maybe go to college.

This is memory loss. It is true that if you think about who the Great Carly was or where Kuala Lumpur fell, you just have to type and immediately the internet will tell you.

Do so whenever you have to, but after doing so, try to remember what you have been told not to ask for a second time if it will be necessary, even for a secular work. There is danger that while you think that your computer can tell you at any moment, you lose the taste of getting used to.

It would be like knowing that there are buses or subways to get from one road to another that enable you to move without getting tired that it is very comfortable in itself and that whenever you hurry, you feel that you no longer need to walk. But if you don't walk enough, then you get “capable of differentating”, as it says today about those who are forced to move in a wheelchair.

Okay, I know you're into sports and that's how you move your body, but let's go back to your mind. Memory is a muscle like that of the feet, which if you don't exercise a wrinkle and transform (in mental perspective) with another kind of ability, so that we can speak clearly, an idiot. Moreover, as for everyone, there is the danger that with aging comes Alzheimer's, one of the ways to avoid this unpleasant incident is to exercise memory.

And here's my diet. Every morning, learn a verse, a short poem. It would be nice to compete with your friends to see who remembers more. If you don't like poetry then do it with football formations, but be careful, because you don't just need to know who Rome's footballers are today, but also those of other teams, though not even the former teams of mendo that I remember the Turin formation at the time when their plane, with all the players on board, crashed into the Superga: Bacigalupo, Ballari, Maroso, etc.). Make your memory racing, maybe even for the books you read, somebody was aboard Hispaniola in search of the island of Treasury. Lord Trealney, Captain Smallt, Dr. Leversey, Long John Silver, Jim...

Try it if your friends can remember who the servants of the three musketeers and the D.A.Artgunn'Grimaud, Baz, Mousqueton and Planchet were. . And if you don't want to read the three musketeers and you don't know what you're missing, then do it, where I know, with one of the stories you've read. It's a game, but you'll see how your head will be populated by characters, stories, memories of any kind. You must have wondered why computers were once called electronic brains.

It was because they were conceived in your model brain; but our brain has more connections than a computer. It's the kind of computer you carry with you, that grows and strengthens through your exercise, and your computer is on the table, the more you use it, the more you lose your speed of action, and after a few years I'll change.

While your brain can last up to 90 years and at this age, if you've practiced it, it will remember more of what you remember now. And free. It's then the historical memory, what's not about the facts of your life or the things you read, but about what happened before you were born. Today, if you go to the movies, you have to get into a fixed hour, when the movie starts and someone starts picking you up and tells you what happens.

In my time you could get to the movies at any moment, I mean even in the middle of the show, get it there while some things were happening and try to figure out what happened before then, when the movie started from the beginning, whether everything was understood properly except if we liked the movie you could stay and review what was already seen. Well, life is like a movie in my day.

We come to life while many things have already happened, for hundreds of thousands of years and it's important to understand what happened before we were born. To understand better why many new things happen today.

Now, the school in addition to your personal reading was supposed to teach you to memorize what happened before you were born, but it turns out that she doesn't get it right, because a lot of research tells us that today's young people, even the greats who go to college, if they were born in 1990 they don't know and maybe don't want to know what happened in 1980 and I don't mean those who went back 500 years. Statistics tell us that if you ask some who Aldo Moro was to answer that he was actually captured by the Red Brigades he was actually killed by the Red Brigades.

We do not talk about the latter, which remains mysterious to the people, yet there was something less than 30 years ago. I was born in 1932, ten years after the rise in power of Fascism, but I also knew who was the prime minister at the time of Marching on Rome. Perhaps the fascist school had made me learn his name to explain to me how stupid and bad that minister was.

Okay, but at least I knew it. Then, aside from school, a young man today doesn't know who the cinema actors were 20 years ago, while I knew who Francesca Bertini was playing in silent movies 20 years before I was born. Perhaps because I looked through old magazines packed in our closet, but I also invite you to look through older magazines because it is a way to learn what happened before you were born.

But why is it so important to know what happened before? Because in many cases what has happened gives an explanation of why certain things happen today and, in any case, as with football formations, is a way of enriching our memory.

Keep in mind that you cannot do this just about books and magazines, and it can be done very well online. Which should be used not only to chat with your friends but also to chat (if we can express ourselves that way) with the history of the world. Who were the Hittites? What about Camisards? And what was Columbus ' three carats called? When did dinosaurs disappear? Could Noah's ark have had a steering wheel? What's the name of the dog's predecessor? Was it more tigers 100 years ago? What was the empire of the mountain? And who spoke of the empire of Evil? Who was the second pope in history? When did Topolino show up? I could go on indefinitely, and it would be all beautiful research adventures.

All of this must be remembered. The day will come when you will be old and feel like you have lived 1,000 years, because it will be as if you had been present in the battle of Waterloo, existing in the murder of Julius Caesar, or been a few steps away from where the Black Bertold was called, mixing substances to find the way gold was produced, wrongly discovered the powder and blew himself up and it was well done. Other friends of yours, who will not have cultivated their memory, will have lived a single life - theirs, which must have been who knows how melancholic and poor in emotion. ” /psi. al