“Life is learned”, a journey into culture with Corrado Augias

With distant Sardinian origins and almost ninety years of excellent aptitude, Corrado Augias is certainly one of the most popular intellectuals in our country, a popularity that arises from his long-standing relationship with television. The famous journalist and writer, in fact, has always seen television as a tool to talk about culture, delve deeper and create higher quality programs that are merely slaves to the audience. It is no coincidence that he is one of the few, if not the only one, who still has the courage to promote and talk about books on TV.

Books are the great protagonists of Augias's latest editorial effort, "Life is learned" (Einaudi, 2024, euro 20, pp. 296. Also Ebook), a true literary autobiography given that the author does not limit himself to retrace the many events of his long existence, but presents the figures who enriched his intellectual path and, at the same time, his awareness as a citizen: from Tito Lucrezio Caro to Renan, from Feuerbach to Freud and then Spinoza, Manzoni, Beethoven, Nietzsche, Leopardi. These were the masters of Augias, thinkers, poets, narrators, musicians, a broad constellation that the author does not hesitate to call his pantheon, almost assimilating them to secular divinities.

The book, however, is not intended to be a sort of intellectual soliloquy in which to talk about readings, writers, philosophers. Corrado Augias talks about his childhood spent in Libya following his father, an officer of the Regia Aeronautica; the war and the bombings; the nightmare of a ferocious and gloomy occupation; the years in a Catholic college, for him who today professes to be an atheist. And then his professional life, journalism, books, the fortunate circumstances that made him participate in three important events in the cultural life of the country: the birth of the Central Directorate of Cultural Programs of Rai; the foundation of the newspaper La Repubblica in 1976, the relaunch of RaiTre in 1987, which occurred thanks to the creation of some successful television programs from "Telefono Giallo" to "Babele", from "Secret Cities" to the most recent creation "The Joy of Music ”, the last program created for Rai before moving to La7 once again with a successful cultural program: “La Torre di Babele”.

Together with this public dimension there is the more intimate one, we would say spiritual (but not religious), marked by the long apprenticeship to a mature intellectual dimension. As Augias writes in the book, «The leitmotif of the story could be an ideal subtitle: The education of an Italian. If I look back and ask myself how this "education" happened, I must recognize that I owe most of it to the books I read, to the teachings I found there but also to the expressive openings, to the analysis of a personality or an event. Saying that reading certain pages can be revealing does not suffice to describe the importance of the meetings. On more than one occasion, while reading, I discovered that I had before my eyes what I had vaguely intuited without, however, having sufficient ingenuity to turn it into a conscious thought”.

As Ignatius of Loyola said more than five centuries ago, "a house without books is like a fortress without weapons". Except that these "weapons" must have the desire and ability to use them, never losing intellectual curiosity and civil passion. In the manner of Corrado Augias, in short.