“The Falling Girl” by Dino Buzzatti

The story depicts a girl named Marta who falls willingly or accidentally from the highest skyscraper in the city. It is amazing how at the beginning of the story she is but a nineteen-year-old girl, yet at the end she is an old woman. Perhaps the author was trying to convey the quickness in which live easily goes by. People nowadays only take interest in what’s new and exciting meaning that people took interest in the girl when she started falling because she was young and vibrant and then we tend to through the old aside, referring to as how the people in the lower floor don’t really care for the people that are about to die at the pavement in front of their own building. It is also implied in the story that everything new and wonderful, can become dull and boring if copied, or reproduced enough times as we see when all these other girls start jumping off the skyscraper and suddenly the girl who started the trend is no longer the center of attention. There is also a hint of the mathematical paradox the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea spoke of, in which it is described that an arrow would never reach the tree it was intended to hit because it has to cover half the distance to get to it’s destination, so the arrow slows its velocity the closer it gets to its goal. We see these mainly when it is described how Marta first fell with great speed and then started to slow down, as she got closer to the ground. The way people take their life for granted and just waste it on everyday simplicities such as fashion, attention or just doing nothing makes the human the only animal in the world to waste the time it is given unto this Earth. We may be the predominant species on the Earth with a rational mind, but we are also the dumbest creature on it.