Floating Peanut

I never remember actors’ names, and as I am not good at remembering faces it is often difficult for me to recognize even the most famous of them. This infuriates him; his scorn increases as I ask him whether it was this one or that one; ‘You don’t mean to tell me,’ he says, ‘You don’t mean to tell me that you didn’t recognize William Holden!’ And in fact I didn’t recognize William Holden. All the same, I love the cinema too; but although I have been seeing films for years I haven’t been able to provide myself with any sort of cinematic education. But he has made an education of it for himself and he does this with whatever attracts his curiosity; I don’t know how to make myself an education out of anything, even those things that i love best in life; they stay with me as scattered images, nourishing my life with memories and emotions but without filling the void, the desert of my education.
He tells me I have no curiosity, but this is not true.

Excerpt from He and I, Natalia Ginzburg, 1962