BOOKS OF FRIENDS
The words of childhood:1) Alcott, Little Women - Little Women Grow Up
2) Raimond Queneau, Zazie in the metro
3) Italo Calvino, Italian fairy tales
The words of adolescence:
4) Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Years of Travel, or Renunciates
5) Goethe, The elective affinities
6) Herman Hesse: everything.
7) Robert Musil, The Young Torless
8) Charles Schultz, all comics.
The least confused words of the "university era"
9) Artur Schitzlner, everything
10) Thomas mann, Doctor Faustus
11) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
12) Tommaso Landolfi, everything
13) Thomas Bernard, The unsuccessful
14) Borges, The Aleph
15) Borges, Fictions
16) Borges, Other inquisitions
17) Rudolph Arnheim, Film as art
18) Sartre, La nausée
19) Sartre, The words
20) Carlos Castaneda, everything
21) Maurice Blanchot, The literary space
22) Angelo Maria Ripellino, Magic Prague
23) Giovanni Macchia, The room of the passions
24) Emilio Garroni, Sense and paradox
The words of adulthood
25) Chitra Divakaruni, all; Murakami ;, J. Cohen; Banana Yoshimoto; Manuel Vasquez Montalban, Antonio Tabucchi
etc. etc.
Note: every time I start making catalogs, afterwards I realize that the essential is left out. For example,
Roland Barthes where do I put them? And Franco Basaglia?
Renata Turco
BOOKS
When he woke up in the middle of the woods in the dark and cold of the night he reached out to touch the child who slept next to him. Nights darker than darkness and days a grayer one than the one just past. Like the beginning of a cold glaucoma that clouded the world. His hand rose and fell with each precious breath. He took off of
off the plastic sheet, he pulled himself up wrapped in his smelly clothes and blankets and looked east for light but
there was none. In the dream from which he had awakened he was wandering in a cave with the child who guided him holding him for
but no. The flashlight's beam danced on the damp walls filled with limestone concretions. As travelers of one
fairytale swallowed and lost in the bowels of a granite beast. Deep stone gorges where water dripped and
he murmured. The minutes of the earth marked in silence, its hours, days, years without stopping. Then they found themselves in one
large stone room where a black and ancient lake opened. And on the opposite bank a creature that raised its jaws
dripping from that karst pit and stared into the torchlight with eyes as white and blind as spider eggs.
He dangled his head just above the surface of the water as if to smell what he could not see. Curled up
there, pale, naked and translucent, with opalescent bones casting their shadow on the rocks behind her. Her
bowels, his heart alive. The brain throbbing in an opaque glass bell. He was swinging his head to one side
at the other, it emitted a deep moan, turned and walked away fluid and silent in the darkness.
With the first gray light the man got up, left the sleeping child and went out onto the street, crouched down and studied.
the territory to the south. Arid, dumb, godless. He thought it was October but he wasn't sure. It had been years since
owned a calendar. They were moving south. They wouldn't have survived another winter.
… ..
They hunkered down on the street and ate rice and cold beans they had cooked days ago. They began
already to ferment. There was nowhere to light a fire without being seen. They slept against each other in between
smelly quilts in the dark and cold. He held the baby close to him. So thin. My angel, he said. Angel
my. But assuming he was a good father, he knew things could be just as she said. That the
child was the only thing that separated him from death. 23
BOOKS
ELIAS CANETTI, THE PROVINCE OF MAN, ADELPHI
"There are books that have been possessed for twenty years without reading them, that are always kept close, that one carries with him
city to city, from country to country, packed with care, even if we have very little space, and perhaps we
time to take them out of the trunk; however we are careful not to read even a single sentence in its entirety. Then, after
twenty years, there comes a time when all of a sudden, almost for very strong coercion, one cannot do without
reading one of these books in one go, from top to bottom: it's like a revelation. Now we know why we have it
treated with so many ceremonies. He had to stay close to us for a long time; he had to travel; he had to occupy a place; where you go
be a burden; and now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty years spent in which he lived, mute, with us. Not
could say so much had he not been mute all that time, and only an idiot would dare to believe that
inside you have always been the same things "
books......
Miguel Serrano, The Hermetic Circle (1966), astrolabe publishing house, 1976, p. 10
"As with men, I had the impression that books also have their own particular destinies
towards the people who await them and reach them at the right time. they are composed of living matter and
continue to shed light through the darkness long after their authors die "
BOOKS
He waited for him on the road and when the man emerged from the woods he was holding the suitcase and the blankets over one shoulder. Neither
she chose one and gave it to the child. Here, he said. Put it on, you're cold. The boy started to give him the gun
but the man did not want it. You keep that, he said.
Ok.
Do you know how to use it?
Yes.
Ok.
And my dad?
There is nothing else we can do for him.
I guess I want to go say hello.
Can you do it alone?
Yes.
So go. I wait for you.
He went back into the woods and knelt beside his father. He was wrapped in a blanket, as the man had promised, and the
child did not find out but sat down next to him and began to cry without being able to stop. He wept for quite a while
piece. I'll talk to you every day, she whispered. And I won't forget. For nothing in the world. Then he got up, turned and walked back towards
the street.
When the woman saw him she hugged him and held him tight. Oh, she said, how glad I am to see you. Occasionally the
woman talked to him about God. He tried to talk to God, but the best thing was to talk to his father, and in fact we
he spoke and never forgot it. The woman said it was fine like that. He said that God's breath is always the
breath of God, even if it passes from one man to another forever.
Once in the mountain streams there were the salmeri-ni. You could see them standing in the amber water with the white tip
fins that swayed slowly in the current. You picked them up and they smelled of musk. They were shiny and strong and
they twisted in on themselves. On the back they had vermicelli drawings that were maps of the world in the making. Maps
and labyrinths. Of something that could not be put back. That couldn't be fixed. In the ravines where
they lived everything was older than man, and vibrated with mystery.
they twisted in on themselves. On the back they had vermicelli drawings that were maps of the world in the making. Maps
and labyrinths. Of something that could not be put back. That couldn't be fixed. In the ravines where
they lived everything was older than man, and vibrated with mystery.
logos
In the beginning was the thought
en archè en o logos
John the Evangelist, chapter 1, verse 1
PLACES TIME
A privileged place
To be loved and to love a tree, a mountain, a clearing. Love the wonder and terror of nature (last night a
rushing wind caught me far from home, forcing me to find shelter in an abandoned cottage).
Then also contemplate, “taste yourself”, savor your own substance. This is enough to fill life. As long as
a thing does not remain as it was before having contemplated it. Wake up a sleepy world and bring it alive to the spirit,
make every image a privileged place.
Finally, don't worry too much about the future, because - a lot - it's like walking towards nowhere.
http://cleliamazzini.tumblr.com/post/29459977
MELANCHOLY (AN UNKNOWN SADNESS)
This is what poetry must do today: capture the most hidden parts of life and return them with a new, simple voice,
that always and in any case leave the mark of a path that comes from afar, but that will never lead close.
So I dripped from the word:
a fragment of the night
with arms wide open
one scale only
to weigh leaks
in this stellar time
dropped into the dust
imprinted.
It's late now. What is light leaves me
and what is heavy
the shoulders are already gone
like clouds
arms and hands
free in their gesture.
The color of memory is always very dark
He takes me back like that
the night in his possession.
Nelly Sachs
from Poets of Melancholy
TO EAT
«Refrain, O mortals, from contaminating your body with impious dishes! There are the cereals, there are the fruits that they fold with
their weight the branches, turgid bunches of grapes on the vines. There are delicious vegetables, there are some that can be made
tastier with cooking.
And no one forbids you milk, and honey that smells of thyme. The generous earth provides you with every good thing and offers you
banquets without the need for killing and blood.
Ah, what an enormous crime it is to drive viscera into the viscera, to fatten the greedy body by cramming another body into it
live off the death of another living being!
Amidst all the abundance of Earth's produce, the best of all mothers, you really don't like anything else than
to chew poor wounded meats with a cruel tooth, making the Cyclops verse with the muzzle? And only by destroying another
will you be able to appease the exhaustion of a voracious and vicious womb? "
Ovid, The metamorphoses, XV, 75-95
mass
"The crowd had thickened at dusk, every moment more, until, when the beaks lit up, it began to flow in
two opposite dense and continuous directions. My observations were, at first, abstract and generic. I started with
considering passersby under their mass aspect and having their minds only on their collective relations. But I came afterwards
details and I applied myself in a minute examination in order to sift the diversity of types from their clothes, appearance,
from the gait, from the faces. [...] When the physiognomy of an old man caught my attention, due to the bony singularity of
his expression. And, including an ardent desire not to lose sight of that man and to know about his
I count more, I launched into the street, struggling my way through the throng in the same direction in which those
seemed to have disappeared. I followed him, at a short distance, a student of not arousing any suspicion of his [...]
He took a few steps and then withdrew in the direction of the river until he came within sight of one of the major theaters of the
city, while the crowd, at the end of the show, poured, from all the wide open doors, into the street. The old,
then, he opened his mouth as if to let out a great breath that had hatched, and I saw him throw himself headlong
in the midst of the crowd. The expression of deep anguish, the marks of which he bore on his face, seemed to relax. But
since the group behind which he seemed to have placed himself was gradually disappearing, I realized that the poor
he was caught up in his former restlessness. A final wreck of the crowd, one, dragged behind him for a while
barely a dozen shouters, but like these, separating a little at a time, they remained, at the bend of an alley
dark, only in three, the stranger stopped and stood for a moment in thought. [...] But in the meantime that we
we proceeded, the noise of life came towards us, gradually, more and more distinct and, all of a sudden, we saw
in the dark broken up crowds of people stirring. The old man then seemed to perk up again and throb with one
flicker of life similar to that which sends a lamp that is about to be extinguished, and once again it resumed
walk with a certain resolution and speed "
(taken from the short story "Man of the Crowd" by Edgar Allan Poe).
MARRIAGE CONVERSATION
"Marriage as a long conversation - When it comes to getting married, you have to ask yourself a question: do you think you can
converse pleasantly with this woman, until old age? Everything else in the marriage is transitory, but for
most of the time the relationship is conversation "
in Too Human, I, 1878, 406
youth maturity
The delusion of maturity follows the illusion of youth.
Benjamin Disraeli
SHARED MEMORY FASCISM ANTIFASCISM
from Sergio Luzzatto, The crisis of anti-fascism, Einaudi 2002
"It happens today to witness a paradox: men and women who, at the age of twenty, choose anti-fascism rather than
fascism, contributed in an extraordinary way to redeem Italy from the historical fault of the dictatorship, are found
now from octogenarians to having to confess for sins they have not materially committed. Or yes
prepare to die in silence "
“Confusion that exists today between shared memory and shared history; more generally between need for memory and
need for history .... It should be explained that the collective memory on which the brilliant mind of one was toiling
scholar like Marc Bloch does not necessarily equate to shared memory "(p. 15) whose praise the
overdone revisionists. "The one (the story) refers to a single past, which none of us can escape, while
the other (shared memory) seems to assume a more or less forced operation of zeroing out identities and
concealment of differences. The risk of a shared memory is a negotiated forgetfulness, communion
in forgetfulness "(p. 25).
"I think the time has come to tell the bad teachers - they vote to the right or to the left - something very simple, but to
put it loud and clear: the civil war fought between 1943 and 45 (or 46) does not need bipartisan interpretations that
redistribute right and wrong, praise and obituaries equally. Because certain civil wars deserve to be fought.
And because the morality of the Resistance also consisted in the determination of the anti-fascists to refound Italy
even at the cost of shedding blood "(p. 29)." I repeat: you can share a story - and you can share a
nation or even a homeland - without having to share memories. I say more: a nation and even
a homeland needs antagonistic memories like bread, based on original lacerations, on values
identity, on belongings that cannot be abdicated or negotiated ".
Today, with my historical colleague - as well as my former professor at the Normale - Roberto Vivarelli I certainly share,
as an Italian citizen, a whole story. It is that same story (so heartbreaking afterwards, and in fact so little
studia¬ta) that made in the majority of Italian Jews, and perhaps my grandfather, as many willing admirers of
Mussolini. But if we talk about me ¬ memory, I want and expect that mine and that of Vivarelli remain separate memories.
He should also keep the memory of his squadron father, a walker on Rome, a volunteer in all the wars of the Duce; Yes
keep the memory of himself, beardless volunteer of the black brigades. I keep the memory of my grandfather that I don't have
never known: of the doctor who lost, after the university chair, all right to treat "Aryan" patients, before
to hide in Lucca like a hunted mouse to escape the extreme results of racial persecution. And me
I keep the memory of my father as a child, who had to hide his origins in the mountains of the Garfagnana
condition of "half" Jew, so as to avoid the train to Auschwitz.
Furthermore, I argue that it is absurd to expect to shed the blood of my grandfather, my father, or anyone
jew fortunately escaped the Final Solution, in the unlikely cauldron of a blood of winners in all
and quite distinct from the blood of the vanquished. No, I really can't think of my grandfather as a winner: he who
in 1915, as a fervent Triestine irredentist, he volunteered in the Great War to fight under the
insignia of Ca¬sa Savoia; he who, twenty years later, read the signature of his teacher Pende at the bottom of the «Ma¬nifesto
of the race "; he who on June 1, 1940 - now a persecuted Jew - nevertheless went down with his son (my
father) in Piazza De Fer¬rari, in Genoa, to collect Mussolini's voice announcing from the loudspeaker
stentorian the entry of fascist Italy into the second world war; he who, in the Italy of the Republic, would not have
however, the seat of his university chair is more found.
There was an incompatibility of values between the two sides:
"The ethical quality of the values in the name of which the partisan brigades (including the Garibaldi) made the Resistance resides
precisely in their incompatibility with the values in the name of which the black brigades supported the Wehrmacht and the
SS in the repression of anti-fascist banditry "(page 31).
Including the Communist anti-fascists.
In fact, Luzzatto writes:
"We must regret that Communist workers of Italian cities have become gappists and have made life impossible
to the German occupiers, while the existence of Hitler and the Nazi leaders was not threatened, until the entrance
of the Red Army in Berlin, if not from a putschist plot of senior aristocratic officers? "
"I find it more pleasing to recognize the identity card of the country in which I was born in partisan warfare, and I do
It is necessary to think of the Italy of the Resistance as the terrain where the Italians must trace 'now and always' i
non-negotiable boundaries of their identity, the threshold that cannot be renounced by oneself "(p. 33).
Political revisionism, which makes a bundle of every herb, does not want clarity of ideas on this point and tends to
to expel the decisive contribution of the Communists from anti-fascism. Luzzatto writes again:
"The new generations risk not learning the decisive contribution of the Italian Communists to the birth of Italy
new ... and children like mine will no longer hear the venerable names of those who spent their
better than their existence to free Italy from dictatorship and found the Republic: spotless communists e
without fear that they were called Giorgio Amendola or Umberto Terracini, Camilla Ravera or Giancarlo Paietta "(p.
37). And again: "The victory of the Garibaldi Communist meant a free Italy, the victory of the Fascist from Salò
it would have meant a slave Italy "(page 40).
Towards the end of his beautiful book Luzzatto asks himself:
"Can Italy of the third millennium renounce what it has learned as a result of a distant twenty years? For what
that's true, my answer is no. Inoculated at a very high price, the anti-fascism vaccine is still indispensable to health of our political body "(p. 88
MEANS FINE
The tools available to man tend to transform his nature. From means they tend to become purposes. Today this phenomenon has reached its most radical form. The set of tools of advanced societies becomes the fundamental purpose of such companies. In the sense that they aim above all to increase the power of the own tools ...
The Apparatus has transformed its nature, and from a means, an instrument, it has become an aim. From the middle, for the realization of the ideological aims, the indefinite increase of the power of the Apparatus has become the supreme aim ideologies, that is the purpose to which the realization of ideological purposes is subordinated.
[Emanuele Severino - The fundamental trend of our time]
MYTHS
What is the myth? Not a collection of stories, nor even a religious experience, but a pure and simple "encounter"
(just remember Odysseus' talks with Athena to understand this).
Calasso writes in Literature and the Gods:
... the gods are fleeting guests of literature. They cross it, with the trail of their names. But soon there too.desert. Every time the writer mentions a word, he has to win them back. Mercuriality, which heralds the
Gods, it is also the sign of their evanescence. It had not always been this way. At least, as long as there was a liturgy ...
Here is the line of discrimination: the liturgy, the interrupted "direct" contact, "mediation". Odysseus talks to Athena "face to face ", without disturbance, prophetically. It does not need any" ritual ", except that, implicit, acceptance of his "re-acquaintance" status.
I have always seen Athena as a crucial goddess in the complex man-myth relationship (Bachofen makes her rise.even as a key figure, in its most ancestral phases, for the acquisition of the lógos by man; almost one
sort of feminine "Prometheus". While Gottfried Benn thinks well of putting the artistik's instrument in her hand, in attempt to transform Odysseus into the architect of his plan which, albeit heterodirected, has - perhaps for the first time -
a look that goes beyond the pure and simple idea of the final ordeal. It is the all "Palladian" union between technè and metis).
Many have talked, and for so long, of Odysseus' complex relationship with the women (or goddesses) with whom he is undefeated during his very long nóstos: Calypso, Nausicaa, Circe, Penelope (so changed over the twenty years of separation); no one - perhaps - drew attention to how solid and exclusive the relationship was with Athena. Only old Nestor seems to notice when he tells Telemachus, who has come begging to look for it, his father.
If Athena with the blue eye wanted to love you so much, as she protected the glorious Odysseus in the land of the Teucri, where so many pains we Achaeans suffered - and never have I seen gods love so openly, as Pallas Athena he was close - if he wanted to love you so much and take you to heart, then someone would even forget them wedding ... [Od. III, 218-224]
Yet the relationship with the goddess never seems to cross the limits of the lawful; neither side can you see a gesture, a word, a situation that can suggest a more direct "relationship". This is because the relationship
Athena-Odysseus has never been an "equal" relationship. Odysseus has always been (and has always accepted to be) an "instrument" in Athena's hands (just think of the continuous somatic transformations to which she "magically" submits it, and of which the hero never complains). Athena in fact, through Odysseus, wants to restore
a status quo before the Trojan War, a conflict to which Odysseus was hostile and against which he did his utmost not to participate (and never forgave Palamedes for having forced him to leave in spite of himself). Here is the "matrocinio" the journey à rebours towards Ithaca; here is the heartfelt appeal before the divine assembly; here is the claim ahead of Zeus his role as "generated by the father", to the point of making the latter overcome any reluctance before the fact of depriving the brother Poseidon of the "right" to revenge on the one who had blinded Polyphemus.
Athena wants, very strongly, to return Odysseus to his world. A world subverted by the telluric movement
of war, a world that he will have to reacquire as he left it, intact. For which he will have to fight to the end, in a sort of palingenesis which, while asking for more blood, will flow - always under the good offices of the "goddess from blue eyes "- in the peace finally reached with the elders of Ithaca.
Only then will the parenthesis of an infamous war be finally closed, even if everything, out of the sun and finally peaceful world of Ithaca, will by now ineluctably changed.
Forever. So much so that Odysseus will again be "forced" to leave, as Tiresias had predicted. Without
Athena - this time - can do nothing to protect him and bring him back.
Phrase 369... If, shattered their simulacra, / we cast them out of their temples, / the gods did not die for it. / Or earth
of Ionia, they still love you, their soul still remembers you. / As the August dawn updates on you, / in the air crossing the their life is filled, / and an ethereal semblance of an ephebe, / indefinite, with a swift step, / sometimes crosses your hills.
[Costantino Kavafis - Ionica in "Poesie"]
370. Perhaps so absorbed in looking for lost time we have not taken into account an important factor that concerns just the time.
Are we sure he wants to be found?
posted by Clelia Mazzini @ 03:05 - permalink
MODERNITY TRADITION PARTIALITY GUILTY VICTIMS
... The past is reduced to a single negative value. The new is the only good. There is only me, today, first and last day of world and a supposedly guaranteed and defined tomorrow, a copy of today, better.
Everything is justifiable, justified.
The executioners arouse interest and sympathy, the victims repugnance. Evil is always new, exciting. The good outdated boring anyway. Very modern and an indication of excellent altruistic feelings is the reversal of roles.
The culprit is the victim. The victim in hindsight is guilty.
Vacant sense of responsibility and acknowledging one's own faults, just in case it happens, serves to make those stand out far more serious than the others. Lost sense of honor.
Everything is due and a desire formulated and expressed is equivalent to a right.
The idea of totality as a modern category of the human has been intertwined with the idea of the new. The total man, master absolute of everything, reaching out without limits tends to omnipotence.
Politics, economics, science, even in reverse order, are the three idolatries of the modern.
Non-partiality essential to the coexistence of men.
There is no tension towards a balance between the irreducible individuality and the equally irreducible need of the community in which every being is born, grows, lives and dies, that nothing is to itself neither the one nor the many. ...
Die MOURNING
".... First of all for us there is nothing that can replace the absence of a loved one, it is something that
we must try; it is a fact that must simply be endured and in front of which one must hold out.
At first glance it seems very difficult, while it is also a great consolation: why, actually staying open the void, one also remains mutually bound by it.
He is wrong when it is said that GOD fills the void; it does not fill it at all indeed it keeps it open and helps us in this way to preserve the authentic communion between us, albeit in pain. Furthermore, the more beautiful and denser the remember, the heavier the separation.
But gratitude transforms the moment of remembrance into a silent joy. Let us then carry the whole within us.beauty of the past not as a thorn, but as a precious gift.
One must beware of rummaging in the past, of giving oneself up to it, just as one does not look at a precious gift continuously, but only in particular moments, and for the rest it is possessed as a hidden treasure of which existence you are sure; then a lasting joy and strength radiate from the past ... "
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