Introduzione
La Maschera nella prima filologia nietzscheana
In Pirandello
La Maschera tra bene e male.
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Captain Benjamin L. Willard:
Saigon, shit, I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm gonna wake up
back in the jungle.

Captain Benjamin L. Willard:
When I was here, I wanted to be there, when I was there all I could think of was
getting back into the jungle.
Captain Benjamin L. Willard:
Been here a week now, waiting for a mission, getting softer. Every minute I stay
in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets
stronger.
Kurtz: We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig. Cow
after cow. Village after village. Army after army.

Freelance Photographer: What are they gonna say about him? What are they
gonna say? That he was a wise man? That he was a kind man? That he had plans?
That he had wisdom? Bullshit man!

Photographer: Did you know that "if" is the middle of the word
"life"?

Colonel Walter E. Kurtz:
I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream.
That's my nightmare. Crawling, swiftly, along the edge of a straight... razor...
and surviving.

Captain Benjamin L. Willard:
I was going to the worst place in the world and I didn't even know it yet. Weeks
away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a main
circuit cable - plugged straight into Kurtz. It was no accident that I got to be
the caretaker of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz's memory - any more than being back in
Saigon was an accident. There is no way to tell his story without telling my own.
And if his story really is a confession, then so is mine.

Captain Benjamin L. Willard:
How many people had I already killed? There was those six that I know about for
sure. Close enough to blow their last breath in my face. But this time it was an
American and an officer. That wasn't supposed to make any difference to me, but
it did. Shit...charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out
speeding tickets in the Indy 500. I took the mission. What the hell else was I
gonna do?

Col. Kurtz: What do you call assassins who accuse assassins?

Captain Benjamin L. Willard:
No wonder Kurtz put a weed up Command's ass. The war was being run by a bunch of
four star clowns who were gonna end up giving the whole circus away.

Chef: He's worse
than crazy, he's evil!

Chef: I used to
think if I died in an evil place then my soul wouldn't make it to heaven. Well,
fuck. I don't care where it goes as long it ain't here.

Freelance Photographer: He likes you because you're still alive.

Willard: He came from some South Bronx shit-hole, and I think the light
and space of Vietnam really put the zap on his brain.

Zack Johnson: And now here's another blast from the past coming out to
Big Cind, all alone in the mantle room out there with the First Battalion
Thirty-fifth Infantry, and dedicated by the fire team at Ang Cape to their
groupie CO Fred the Head: The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction.

Captain Benjamin L. Willard:
Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they
gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission,
and when it was over, I never wanted another.

Captain Benjamin L. Willard:
Never get out of the boat. Absolutely god damn right. Unless you were goin' all
the way. Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fuckin' program.

Captain Benjamin L. Willard:
They were gonna make me a major for this, and I wasn't even in their fuckin'
army anymore.

Captain Benjamin L. Willard:
Charlie didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep or moving too fast. His idea
of great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home:
death, or victory.

Freelance Photographer: One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no
fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know,
without, like, you know, uh, with fractions - what are you going to land on -
one-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to
Venus or something? That's dialectic physics.

Colonel Walter E. Kurtz:
We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them
to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!

Freelance Photographer: There's mines over there, there's mines over
there, and watch out those goddamn monkeys bite, I'll tell ya.

Captain Benjamin L. Willard:
On the river, I thought that the minute I looked at him, I'd know what to do,
but it didn't happen. I was in there with him for days, not under guard, I was
free, but he knew I wasn't going anywhere. He knew more about what I was going
to do than I did. If the Generals back in the Trang could see what I saw, would
they still want me to kill him? More than ever probably. And what would his
people back home want if they ever learned just how far from them he'd really
gone? He broke from them, and then he broke from himself. I'd never seen a man
so broken up and ripped apart.

Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: I've seen the horrors, horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call
me a murderer. You have a right to kill me, you have a right to do that, but you
have no right to judge me.

Colonel Walter E. Kurtz: It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know
what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of
horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are
enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.

Colonel Walter E. Kurtz:
I worry that my son might not understand what I've tried to be. And if I were to
be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son
everything. Everything I did, everything you saw, because there's nothing that I
detest more than the stench of lies. And if you understand me Willard, you will
do this for me.

Captain Benjamin L. Willard:
Everybody wanted me to do it, him most of all. I felt like he was up there,
waiting for me to take the pain away. He just wanted to go out like a soldier,
standing up, not like some poor, wasted, rag-assed renegade. Even the jungle
wanted him dead, and that's who he really took his orders from anyway.

[His last words]
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz:
The horror. The horror.
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