‘Tis the Silly Season, as British journos call the news doldrums of August, and I’ve got something that fits the bill. Only the exterior involucre of the item on display is a silly shade of pink, however, as the heart of the matter is dark and venomous and repugnant enough to take us well into the autumn.
Some years ago I needed to find a notary public in Palermo, and the memory of that quest is indelible. My parents were then in the poorest health, both of them, their life support in New York being an Uzbek girl my mother had engaged, first as a cleaner and then as the all-around, hands-on savior she later became.
When the mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a pioneer in the field of differential and integral calculus among his other accomplishments, stuck his impressively large nose into metaphysics, we all remember what a ridiculous result this produced. He assured his contemporaries that the world approaches – tends is the term used by his fellow mathematicians and designated in calculus with a horizontal arrow – perfection, a state that, logically enough, the world’s first optimist named the optimum.
Hoping to find him in a sympathetic rather than critical mood, today I offer the gentle reader an English version of what is arguably the most important poem written in Russia in the last century.
Instinctive qualms aside, I should like to say a few words about the role of pornography in modern life. Not from the ethical point of view, as this, on the face of it, is straightforward and makes no distinction between private and public, between a bedroom in Manhattan and a film studio in San Fernando Valley. The moral case is that unless activity of the kind pornography parodies has conception as its specific aim, it is beyond the pale. Once that activity is generalized and the aim obscured, it is no different from theft or fraud.
Yet another good reason to live in poverty, I reckon, is that paying a cool quarter of a million to get squashed inside a tin can at the bottom of the ocean should be well out of one’s reach. I have always regarded the appetite for adventure as at least as attendant on wealth as on feeblemindedness, and I must admit that the much-reviled comment by a leftist politician in England – to the effect that if millionaires can blow their fortunes on subaqueous deathtraps, it means they are not taxed enough – chimes in with my own macabre postmortem.
We have all seen studies, indexes, and tables purporting to assess the level of democratic development throughout the world, and these cannot but remind us of nineteenth-century quackery – something along the lines of Drs. John Kellogg and Havelock Ellis – with its measurements of life force. The truth is we know a man’s alive, and roughly how alive he is, just by looking at him as he reads the morning paper.
I love talking about books I haven’t read. In part because it’s a national tradition, ever since everybody in Russia came up with something nasty to say about Doctor Zhivago without having laid eyes on the novel. But partly, and on a more serious note, because it’s very much in the general tradition of literary dramaturgy, when utterly fictional writers, painters, or composers tread the boards with splendid aplomb even as the reader is left wondering about what their novels, paintings, or sonatas might actually be like.
Friends, acquaintances, sometimes virtual strangers who are acquaintances of friends, come to visit us in Palermo and stay with us every so often. Obviously impressions of the personages inhabiting one’s own house are vivid, far more intense than of those with whom one dines or has drinks, whence, inevitably, the urge to somehow reflect on them in this diary.
No less than Time, which the precocious T. S. Eliot pedantically capitalized already in his school essays, Memory is a slippery subject.
