Manzoni
For Manzoni, the effort to believe wholeheartedly in the Church, to accept its dogmas despite being so critical, must have been so difficult that it facilitated, as a minor task, the creation of a style of unparalleled difficulty.
To the most obtuse contagions, Manzonian writing opposes the subtle but impregnable diaphragm of ironic persecution of human error and inexhaustible introspective patience regarding the events that propagate it.
Wonderfully indigestible to any intellectual charlatanism: this may suffice for the solitude and invincibility of a writer.
The complicated cowardice of the heart is overcome in Manzoni by the intrepid inquiry and definition of the mind. Between Leopardi, who, humanly, points to contempt as a defensive weapon towards himself, towards the weak, towards the sensitive, and Manzoni, who teaches, almost like a martial art such as archery, whose overlapping planes reveal a Japanese master, to delve into the mirabile corruttela that we are, to walk through the human lazaretto as abbagliato da tante piaghe (what an amazing adjective!) —the most difficult master, and also the most poetic, is Manzoni. And the one who delves into the most difficult is the best teacher.
Marcial
Although it is not an essential classic, for those who seek dialogue with life and death outside the bewildering masks of custom and play, it is not forbidden to refine one’s taste and distract oneself for a moment from the present evils against which we can do nothing, smoking some precious leaf and spying, like connoisseurs, on the delicacy of the flowery ones.
Mata Hari
Dancer of the Orient, neither murderer
Nor virgin. Martyr, more or less… Revenge
From the exhausted trench, on a feather.
Merlin
He was a magnificent magician, wearing a tunic padded like a tapestry, which gave off a delicious scent of an ancient and rich country villa. Merlin smelled of cornices, wax, sofas, memories, horsehair mattresses, dampness, high armchairs, sideboards, white linen, cloves, and lit candles at night.
Messiah
The Messiah is not coming.
“But why should he come?”
“I don’t know.”
Moro (Aldo)
Here’s an interesting problem: would a truly great pope have obtained Moro’s release simply by saying “I want it”?
Moses
In his 1921 diaries, Franz Kafka explains Moses’ inability to reach Canaan “not because his life was too short, but because it was a human life.” Moses is the lawgiver who cannot know the law, the surveyor who can never enter the Castle. Even if his life had lasted a hundred and twenty times longer, it would still have been a human life, which is nothing but desert, without the peace of the Delicious Land. His journey has been repeated countless times, and Moses has always seen Canaan, the unspeakable place, only from the border of Moab.
And if Moses, who is the twelve tribes, who is the whole people, the living and the dead, even the children murdered in Egypt, did not reach Canaan, then the people are also detained with him, and sleep in an unknown tomb, on the border of Moab, and cannot enter Canaan. None of us will ever reach where Moses could not reach.
Munch
Munch’s The Scream can be defined as an acoustic revelation, recorded figuratively.
Mussolini
He was the specialist of the Historical Hours quadrant, he never finished, an obsession, but I doubt that he understood anything about history, and modern Italy. He came from socialism, a terrible school of thought!
I have listened again to some of Mussolini’s speeches on record, and once the intoxication has passed, their emptiness is depressingly sad. Did the Man of Destiny speak that way, with that accent? It must be completely indifferent to me, because I cannot get excited about any original conjecture about how and why he embodied, in those mistaken years, something, and even an entire people.
Napoleon
But then, who was he? Will we ever know? The refractory
Shadow dismounted, silhouette
Distant with the famous profile,
Of a muddy and painful light
It is the abandoned fetus. Ruins
Of temple and temples, vase for a rose
He put it down as the hour passed.
Nostradamus
Since 1557, Nostradamus’s Centuries have been in circulation, in which a bearded Christian Sibyl has sealed in an encrypted document the final catastrophes of the second millennium after Christ, those in which we have been living for some time now, and deciphering Nostradamus is no fun… No wonder that never before have his oracles been so fortunate and had so many interpreters. It’s worth the effort…! We strive to exorcise them, neither popes nor presidents (nefas?) speak of them, but our temporary delusions all tingle there, in the ten Centuries, filling their contorted code with impressive announcements…
Their almost elusive oracular obscurity often causes our interpretations to spin in vain, especially when it comes to separating what is already behind us (relief) from what threatens to fall upon us between today and tomorrow, in the tangle of visions from which the anticipated history of our century emerges. Sometimes kneaded with opacity, sometimes under a veil that can be easily dispelled philologically, precise as a shot.
Horace
Flee, Horace, if you are flesh and if you are all soul. Horace is Limbo, neither here nor there. A golden key in the void. He has rarefied everything, he has reached the extreme confines of Verse.
Horace as home and dinner, friendship and work, resignation and overcoming, integral fidelity of the word transmitted to the medium heat of the body, to the normal state of the heart. Here he is, firm, cordial, unique in this distant language that can no longer die.
Horace does not make me happy, in truth he petrifies me. His wandering through the suburban suk or the Esquiline, noting the price of vegetables and farro, is admirable, but it makes me sweat melancholy… That uespertinumque pererro / saepe forum (the Forum at dusk, invaded by magicians, street theaters, acrobats, fried fritters, ice cream vendors, drugged cynics, transvestites) and the return home to a plate of leeks and chickpeas (Sat. sexta), contains reserves of heartbreak and evening pangs for many centuries.
Rembrandt
In the folds of Rembrandt’s cloaks nestles the whole of humanity with its eternal drama; the more rarefied the light on the canvas, the greater the illumination that emanates from that sensitive darkness.
With a few billion lire, it is possible to take a Rembrandt home, but the light of Rembrandt, which is a non-negotiable message of the transcendent, would be left behind.
Rimbaud
“I am truly from beyond the grave,” declares Arthur, and we must believe him: “I had other things to do than live.”
Sappho
Who knows if Sappho, in the famous fragment, contemplates in her heart the passing of the empty Hours in the sand of an hourglass, or if she continues on her way, truly entrusting herself to the moon and the Pleiades?
Shalamov
The immensity and intensity of the pain expressed in Shalamov’s stories are intolerable for the average reader: they lack even the ideas for comparison—the experience of the cold of Kolyma and the Soviet ugliness of Moscow, of the infinite Soviet Ugly. It can only be understood if there is a lot of soul.
San Juan de la Cruz
Frightened of having written verses that blinded with light, he buried them under mountains of clods of commentary.
Seferis
Seferis’s poetry lacks a certain something, which makes it flawed and fascinating, searchable, strangely remote and current, full of historical pain, marine and archaeological remains… Poetry of mutilated statues: if they were whole, they would have less charm. But it leaves us uncertain, unsatisfied, because of that lack that attracts us. (Perhaps my poetry has the same effect, when it does).
Sironi
In Mario Sironi’s Lamp, in Brera, a female mannequin, with her head bowed down, brushes the light bulb with the movement of her arm, which dimly illuminates a green table on which rests a wooden pyramid, one of those used to experience a space removed from corruptibility. Next to the table is a Thonet chair. The mannequin wears white high-heeled shoes.
A window opens onto the void: a street, a night sky that no light can illuminate. “You will have no other light than this, from now on,” says the mannequin: “a lamp not fed by any olive tree, a reason amputated from the heart…” Sironi’s soul is closed and arduous: while others played with metaphysics, he lived it and transfigured it into pain.
Spinoza
Spinoza laughed, once in a while, but he tries to laugh within his system. There, laughter is forbidden by angelic guardians, who at the slightest hint of it immediately fear an offense to the perfection of God, who produces no error, no sin, no deformity, no grimace that can be laughed at. For the same reason, in that absolute perfection there is nothing purely human that allows us to bathe it with our poor tears.
Some Spinozian truths are the same as those of poetry and the novel: we do not desire a thing because we consider it good, we consider it good because we desire it.
Tolstoy
For seven days, the great Tolstoy was assisted by a stationmaster.
His agony had a unique acoustic consolation: the clatter of the wire telegraph, the passing of trains through Ostapovo.
Ungaretti
If Ungaretti was lost before his time, there is an explanation: he was only a poet…
And here we are, between fire and fire, we have, we will always have more thirst for a refreshment of thought, for red lanterns in the burning mine that guide us out, that interpret the world in vision to free us from it, so that the poetic Way dissolves us from the mortal phenomenal embrace with a few strange chords on the misunderstood Indefiniteness.
Van Gogh
Here, between blue and yellow, the shot was fired.
A life of suffering, fatigue, convulsions, patience, enthusiasm, and endless disappointments. Always on the rack, under the lashes of Destiny, mocked by Fortune, forced by the God who gives more pain to those he loves most, to sink magically into the secrets of his creation—gradually forgetting the working-class condition that had obsessed him, so as to hear nothing but the telluric groan, the breath of Being, to humble himself sovereignly in the passion of the cypress, in the soul of a straw chair, in the rapture of sunflowers.
A life of pain, without the vulgarity of a truce, of a discount, which we, former bourgeois, former workers, can envy him, we who are condemned by the rejection of the suffering of living to surrender to the niece of darkness and evil.
Verne (Jules)
Verne is not ironic, he creates myths.
Zola
I read and reread Zola to rediscover the good, the multiple, the concrete infinite, as a respite from the ironic and the satirical, because the heart splashes widely, with brazen tolerance of shivers and tears, to let me be intensely reached and overwhelmed by pity and life.
Excerpts from La fragilità del pensare (BUR Biblioteca Univ. Rizzoli, 2000).
Translation from Italian: Rafael Cienfuegos Lamberti.
Image: Stone Operation (Allegory of Touch) (1624), by Rembrandt.
