Eat, Pray, Love

authorities arrested a brotherhood of Catholic monks in Sicily who were in tight conspiracy
with the Mafia, so who can you trust? What can you believe? The world is unkind and unfair.
Speak up against this unfairness and in Sicily, at least, you’ll end up as the foundation of an
ugly new building. What can you do in such an environment to hold a sense of your individual
human dignity? Maybe nothing. Maybe nothing except, perhaps, to pride yourself on the fact
that you always fillet your fish with perfection, or that you make the lightest ricotta in the whole
town?
I don’t want to insult anyone by drawing too much of a comparison between myself and
the long-suffering Sicilian people. The tragedies in my life have been of a personal and largely
self-created nature, not epically oppressive. I went through a divorce and a depression, not a
few centuries of murderous tyranny. I had a crisis of identity, but I also had the resources
(financial, artistic and emotional) with which to try to work it out. Still, I will say that the same
thing which has helped generations of Sicilians hold their dignity has helped me begin to re-
cover mine—namely, the idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s hu-
manity. I believe this is what Goethe meant by saying that you have to come here, to Sicily, in
order to understand Italy. And I suppose this is what I instinctively felt when I decided that I
needed to come here, to Italy, in order to understand myself.
It was in a bathtub back in New York, reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary, that I
first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself
that I probably couldn’t have picked me out of a police lineup. But I felt a glimmer of happi-
ness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness
after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it
drags you face-first out of the dirt—this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life;
it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within
life, no matter how slight.
I came to Italy pinched and thin. I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don’t fully
know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late—through the enjoy-
ment of harmless pleasures—into somebody much more intact. The easiest, most fundament-
ally human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist more now than I did four months
ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I will leave with the hope
that the expansion of one person—the magnification of one life—is indeed an act of worth in
this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody’s but my own.
Eat, Pray, Love
Eat, Pray, Love