“The only way not to waste our life is to lose it through saving others”

“The only way not to waste our life is to lose it through saving others” is a principle the narrator associates with Roberto’s Sunday address in the church. It turns the fear of losing one’s life into an ethical imperative: life acquires meaning through efforts to save other people.

The Sunday Address

Roberto spoke standing with his back to the altar, while Don Giacomo listened from a shabby table at the end of the nave. The narrator remembers little of the address with confidence. Time has blurred the speech’s wording and order, and emotion may have made it difficult to listen; the address survives instead as a set of possible arguments and a lasting impression.

Among the ideas the narrator thinks Roberto may have expressed was the need for courage. The maxim about saving others appears in that uncertain recollection, not as a securely reconstructed passage. Its claim is nevertheless clear: a life is not wasted simply because it is risked or spent for another person’s sake.

Ethical Meaning and Memory

The maxim belongs to a broader moral register in the narrator’s account of the speech. Other recollections include the need to calculate one’s resources before undertaking something difficult and the demand to act justly, mercifully, and faithfully rather than hide injustice or infidelity behind convention. These remembered themes frame courage not as recklessness, but as responsibility joined to clear judgment and honest conduct.

The line’s force is sharpened by the uncertainty surrounding it. The narrator cannot establish exactly when Roberto said it, but remembers it as one of several possible Sunday teachings that remain attached to the address. The speech is therefore preserved less as a transcript than as an ethical impression: saving others gives purpose to the very life that such an effort may require one to risk.