Education Quote by Antonio Tabucchi

Tabucchi pulls off a neat double move here: he crowns literature as the core of his being, then immediately refuses the romantic trap that usually follows. “Literature is my life” could be the standard writerly altar call, but he reroutes it through philosophy. Ontology isn’t about what he does; it’s about what he is. Literature becomes a mode of existence, the medium through which reality is organized, questioned, and made livable. It’s identity at the deepest register, not just vocation.

Then he swivels: “From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.” Existential isn’t abstract essence; it’s lived time, routines, other people, the daily negotiation with meaning. Teaching is where literature stops being a private metaphysical obsession and turns social. It’s also where the writer’s authority gets punctured in a healthy way: the classroom forces you to translate your highest convictions into shared language, to meet resistance, boredom, misunderstanding. That friction keeps literature from becoming a sealed system.

The subtext is quietly anti-myth: he’s not performing the solitary-genius pose. He’s admitting that the life of the mind still needs a life among minds. For a late-20th-century European writer shaped by political aftershocks and cultural skepticism, this split matters. Literature can be ontological and still not enough. Teaching is the existential remedy: a chosen way of being-with-others that makes the metaphysics answerable to the day.