Beyond the Wall, a Garden

When I sent my animated short film The Garden to Professor Lino Pertile, he responded by describing it as:

“delizioso ed elegante: un perfetto connubio naturale-umano-artistico, diciamo un idillio tra storia e natura dove non c’è posto per ‘il male di vivere.’” 

("delightful and elegant: a perfect union of nature, humanity and art – one could say an idyllic blend of history and nature where there is no room for 'the pain of living'")

What struck me was not only the generosity of the comment, but the literary tension hidden inside it.

A few days earlier, before watching the film, Pertile had written to me from Florence during their beautiful spring. In his email, he mentioned Arturo Graf’s Il mito del paradiso terrestre, and the recurring image of travellers, in search of Eden, arriving at a wall. Then he reminded me that this same image appears in one of Eugenio Montale’s most famous poems, Meriggiare pallido e assorto. 

He suggested that I read Montale’s poem which “dalla prima all’ultima stanza, è una perfetta, meravigliosa sceneggiatura per un film d’animazione” (“from the first to the last stanza, it is a perfect, wonderful script for an animated film”).

It felt like an extraordinary coincidence as my animation, The Garden, illustrates a man pausing at a wall overlooking a garden - but the worlds disclosed by the two works could not be more different.

In Montale’s poem, the landscape is harsh and dry with cracked earth, ants, snakes, thorny plants and finally the famous image of the wall topped with broken bottles. The wall feels impenetrable and the world seems to have little meaning. Consciousness leads to a form of existential disillusionment, which illustrates il male di vivere (“the pain of living”).

In The Garden, by way of contrast, a man pauses at a wall – but there is also a gate. Nature is alive, in motion: birds move quietly through trees, squirrels climb among statues, and a cat sleeps peacefully in the afternoon sun. The atmosphere is contemplative, almost Edenic.

What interested me afterward was not which vision is “correct,” but whether darker visions of life are inherently more truthful than peaceful ones. Montale’s view is profound, but it is also shaped by a particular inward disposition – one that is attentive to fracture and estrangement. My film emerges from a different mode of attention: one drawn toward stillness, gentleness and rest.

Instead of inventing beauty where none exists, perhaps peace widens perception. An anxious or wounded consciousness can become intensely attentive to threat, danger, or  loss – sometimes revealing forms of suffering that a more tranquil gaze might overlook. A peaceful consciousness may notice subtle beauty, rhythms and textures of life that were always there, but easily crowded out. 

We may have become more comfortable recognizing fracture than recognizing peace. Yet perhaps neither perception fully exhausts reality.  Both works – Montale’s poem and my short film – may disclose something true about human existence.

The idea that inward states shape perception appears repeatedly throughout literary, philosophical, and spiritual traditions. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, spiritual disorder is often linked to distorted perception and disordered love, while Paradiso is associated with increasing clarity, harmony, and right relation. Similarly, contemplative traditions from the Desert Fathers to Renaissance humanism, often connected stillness, otium, and inward peace with forms of attentiveness that allow reality to appear more fully. Not because suffering disappears, but because perception widens as agitation no longer dominates it entirely.

And perhaps in the search for Eden by travellers throughout literary history, earthly paradise did not simply refer to a hidden geographical place somewhere beyond reach, but also to a recovered way of seeing.

Written in conjunction with the animated short film The Garden.