how to make a hero
You make a world. You put a person in the middle of it and you give him something to believe in. Now look at how sweetly he shows his faith to his brothers and how he teaches them to cultivate that precious warm center. Take a look. They begin, little by little, to mold that black, bilious material that surrounds them into something that resembles them, but is better than them. They begin to rip small pieces off the freezing cold world that surrounds them, can you see them? Can you see them focusing all their attention and their love onto these things?
This raw material looks like heavy snow at the edges of the roads, cold and dirty, but then, enclosed in the cavity of their hands, it gets warm, becoming first hot embers, then scintillas with an unexpected glow. Thus the cold world starts to come to life and fires their imagination, becoming the living substance that reassures and accompanies them, as their lives go by. Now nothing does them harm. With a little effort, a stone becomes a limb, a mound of black soil becomes a volume, an impression becomes a thin veil of skin, until the best of the brothers obtains it. And so the story of a man. The story of a man with silver skin and bones, so they say. The shape of his face does not matter, nor do his clothes; the only thing that counts is his history, so they say.
The history of this man is that of the best of the brothers. Just as they told it to me, I’m telling it to you. He has two left feet with which he moves incessantly, like the foxes that run across the fields in the evening, while the moon is reflected by his iron hair, so they claim. The best of the brothers has a hollow chest that contains this magic, the call of that fire that keeps alive the force which animates cold things. And so everyone eats from his hands and kisses his wrists to thank him. They say that one day *** noticed a small crack near his porcelain nipples. A small dark fissure that made its way from the areola towards the sternum. A small dark segment that, staring at it on his ivory chest, became intolerable. They tried to resist, and for several years it certainly was possible, but then they had to listen to what their great big heart was saying.
