Life & Wisdom Quote by Antonio Tabucchi

“Mixture” is doing the work that words like “identity” usually try to do and fail at. Tabucchi, a writer who lived between languages and loyalties (Italian by birth, deeply tethered to Portugal), knows that civilization isn’t a sealed jar of heritage. It’s a soup: simmered, borrowed, misread, improved, sometimes ruined, always altered. Calling mixture the “salt” is a sly move. Salt is minor in quantity but decisive in effect; without it, everything tastes flat. Translation, migration, trade, intermarriage, artistic theft, religious friction, hybrid slang - these aren’t side dishes to “real” culture. They’re the seasoning that makes it register as vivid.

The line carries an implicit jab at purity politics. Civilizations that obsess over being uncontaminated end up bland, brittle, and anxious, policing borders the way insecure people police group chats. Tabucchi’s phrasing also makes “interesting” the metric, not “great” or “moral.” That’s telling. Mixture doesn’t guarantee virtue; it guarantees complexity. The subtext is that boredom is the true enemy of culture: monotony dressed up as tradition.

Context matters here because Tabucchi came of age in postwar Europe, when national myths were both discredited by catastrophe and rebuilt through nostalgia. His fiction often circles memory, authoritarian residue, and the slippery nature of truth. In that landscape, “mixture” is a quiet antidote to the fantasy of a coherent, singular past. It’s an argument for cultural vitality as a kind of productive impurity - not a threat to civilization, but its flavor.