The mote and the beam

Author: Giuliano Adler

‘Tell me the name of a man, and I will carry him in my heart,’ said the poet. And I say, ‘give me the name of someone. Of anyone. Give me the name of the most innocent person, of the dearest of your friends, of the most virtuous of your acquaintances, of the most esteemed of your colleagues, of the most honest of your bosses, and I will show you the monstrosities, the ridiculous inconsistencies, the pitiful contradictions of each and every one of them. I will show you the profound puerility, the pettiness, the undeniable human incompetence of each and every one of them. No one will escape my judgement, so that even the most unassailable of men will show, precisely because of this supposed perfection, his own frightening and fragile monstrosity.’

About the book

The expression ‘the mote and the beam’ refers to the wellknown parable that Jesus told during the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, warning his followers of the dangers of judging others. 

The following pages talk about human weakness, about the difficulty of establishing authentic and sincere relationships, about judgement and hypocrisy, about hiding behind masks for the sake of a quiet life. They also deal with our inability to know the truth about what others think of us, and describe how we fluctuate in a bubble of carelessness and unconsciousness, suffocating emotions and feelings behind fake smiles. The beam is there, distorting reality and imprisoning us in an ever-deepening solitude, while life around us is ready to explode in all its most disconcerting obviousness.

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About the author

The author was born in Trieste in 1958 to a family that was Istrian on his mother’s side and South Tyrolean on his father’s. It was this alterity that led him to choose Giuliano Adler as the nom de plume for his writing. He graduated in Law at the local University after extremely intense years, spent mostly on reading law books and classics. He studied Homer, Flaubert, Turgheniev, and Mishima, but German writers such as Grimmelshausen, Döblin and Thomas Mann were particularly important for his literary education, so much so that he visited many times Lübeck, Travemūnde, and Zurich.

Giuliano Adler has always had a strong and complex relationship with his birthplace, which he was forced to leave in order to seek wider professional spaces that took him to various Italian cities, including Venice, Milan, and Florence.

He married a woman from Trieste, and they have a daughter. He has worked for years as a manager in industrial and service companies in the field of human resources organisation and development, and now has a managerial role in a multinational corporation.

His debut novel La pagliuzza d’oro was published by Albatros Il Filo in 2020.

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