"A page from Chiaromonte's notebooks contains an extraordinary meditation on what remains of a life. For him the essential issue is not what we have or have not had the true question is, rather, 'what remains? what remains of all the days and years that we lived as we could, that is, lived according to a necessity whose law we cannot even now decipher, but at the same time lived as it happened, which is to say, by chance?' The answer is that what remains, if it remains, is 'that which one is, that which one was: the memory of having been "beautiful", as Plotinus would say, and the ability to keep it alive even now. Love remains, if one felt it, the enthusiasm for noble actions, for the traces of nobility and valour found in the dross of life."
— Giorgio Agamben, Self-Portrait in the Studio