Le lanterne di stagno

‘My ten short stories develop the idea that the sole light which illuminates our life’s path is that of our inner lantern, however weak that may be.’ The ten stories are about the small pleasures and treasured memories that give a meaning to life, commentaries or exemplifications of Stevenson’s presentation of the importance of the imaginative life in ‘The Lantern Bearers’ (an essay that Meschiari, a lecturer in moral philosophy at the Scuola Normale di Pisa, first met with through William James, who praises it in The Will to Believe, 1897). The essay is never directly named, but in the seventh story a traveller from Scotland asks the narrator if he knows ‘the story of the lantern-bearers’ and later on in the same story a part of the essay is quoted and paraphrased. The first story, an evocation of childhood holidays in the country, ends with the grandfather showing him a secret lantern: ‘It doesn’t give much light, it’s true, but when you’re grown up you’ll realize it’s all the light we have’; and the last story, table talk about treasured memories of small pleasures, ends with ‘It was night once again, darkness all around, no land in sight, the lighthouse to the north-west no longer visible, and up above not even the stars. I raised my tin lantern on the tossing deck among the waves. It didn’t give much light, to tell the truth, but it was the only light I had’

Richard Dury, in “The Robert Louis Stevenson Archive"