Success Quote by Eugenio Montale

Montale’s jab lands because it’s aimed at comfort, not catastrophe. “Contemporary civilization of well-being” sounds like a compliment until he frames it as a “dark background”: prosperity as a kind of dimming, a soft tyranny that blurs edges. The line’s quiet provocation is that abundance doesn’t just soothe societies; it smooths them, sanding down the friction that gives art its bite and distinctiveness.

The key verb is “mingle.” It’s not the celebratory mingling of a cosmopolitan salon; it’s a chemical mixing where boundaries dissolve. Montale is describing an aesthetic entropy: in a culture organized around ease, the arts drift toward the same palette of pleasures, the same appetites, the same marketable hybridity. “Lose their identity” reads less like genre purism than a warning about what happens when everything must be accessible, cross-promotable, and instantly legible. When well-being becomes the dominant civic religion, art risks becoming lifestyle - another soothing surface.

Context matters. Montale wrote through fascism, war, and postwar reconstruction, watching Italy move from trauma into consumer modernity. His modernist sensibility prized tension, difficulty, and the hard-earned clarity that comes from resistance. So the subtext is political as much as aesthetic: a society that congratulates itself on comfort can become indifferent to meaning. Art, once a distinct mode of truth-telling, starts to behave like a blended product line. Montale isn’t nostalgic for “pure” forms so much as alert to what gets traded away when culture is designed to feel good.