Stay or Leave? The book.

«I am a Ferrari.»

It’s not a boast, or at least not only that. It’s one of the lines that stayed with me after reading Stay or Leave? by Donato De Tullio, and maybe that’s exactly how certain lines work: they don’t tell us something we didn’t know, they come knocking on the door of something we already knew and kept in a room with the lights off.

By now my copy has a cover dusted with sand. Real sand, from the sea, that got into the pages together with the salt on my fingers, the sun, the towels thrown down next to it, the hours when time finally seems to stop asking anything of us. I didn’t just read this book: I carried it with me, I lived it at the seaside, I opened and closed it while summer went by around me. And I won’t clean that cover. Books that are too intact have something suspicious about them. I prefer the ones that, once read, can prove where they’ve been.

Stay or Leave? talks about decisions without presuming to decide for us. And that’s no small thing, in a time full of people who seem to know other people’s road perfectly. Donato builds instead a method for crossing the fog, for telling what we desire from what we put up with out of habit, prudence from fear, loyalty to ourselves from plain inertia. Because staying is not necessarily courage, and leaving is not necessarily freedom. Sometimes the exact opposite is true.

The five Ds, naturally, gave me a fairly serious side effect: while reading, I started imagining a platform. A place to collect ideas, notes, intuitions still on shaky legs, and run them through the method, question them, connect them, come back to them after a week or six months and discover that in the meantime we are the ones who changed. Not yet another digital dump where notes get buried never to be read again, but a kind of workshop of possibilities. When a book makes you want to build something that didn’t exist before, to me it has already performed a small act of civic magic.

I’ve crossed quite a few crossroads in my life. Some I chose, others found me. At others still I looked at the two roads on offer and, liking neither, started digging. Maybe that’s the point of the book that stayed closest to me: not simply knowing whether to stay or leave, but asking who the man is who, right at that moment, is asking the question. Because sometimes we change road. Other times it’s the road that, slowly, has changed us.

My copy is still missing one thing: Donato’s dedication. Sooner or later I’ll get it. And I hope that, on that day, a few grains of this sand will still be there between his pen and the paper. That would be right. A book should be able to remember the sea. And a Ferrari should know why it starts its engine.