Exult, rejoice! What better way to celebrate eyesight regained, or at least not yet irretrievably lost, than by eating ice cream? At any rate, that’s what my wife was saying as she dragged me to the “tenth edition” of something called the “Sherbeth” Festival del Gelato Artigianale,
I’m writing this while sporting dark sunglasses in the style of Ray Charles, or maybe even of Milton, raised from the dead to headline an Armani eyewear advertising campaign. The trouble with my eyes, apparently, is caused by age – Dr. Jeffrey Heier, a famous Harvard Medical School ophthalmologist, apparently, has published a treatise entitled The Aging Eye – but I confess I attach far greater symbolic significance to this, one hopes transitory, malady. Indeed, why stop at Milton, when one up the stakes and can go for Homer? Technically the thing that’s been happening to my eyes is called...
A good case can be made for the futility of all arguments, starting with the domestic kind and ascending to the theological, but if one finds oneself debating the color of the sunset – which one’s opponent sees as mauve while it’s obviously purple – I suppose that’s life and no harm done. It’s different when the subject is politics, something I haven’t argued about since university. To be sure, I’ve made my views known in writing and in conversation, but a proper argument depends less on exposition than on rebuttals, which are used to corner the opponent and, if...
“I’ll have an espresso. No garlic, please.” What, does the gentle reader think that this is a foolish thing to add? That it’s absurd and unnecessary? Not in London it isn’t, because here anything’s possible. I mean, the people here have invented something called a “double espresso,” which has no greater right to existence than a double car, a double umbrella or a double wife. In Italy, if you want another coffee, you may ask for it, but the whole existential machinery of the thing is set up in such a way that a “double espresso” is patently a nonsense...
The more I travel in Italy, the more often I think that my original choice of cloister – Palermo – may have been the outcome of a rushed decision, like getting married to the girl next door with whose father you liked going fishing. The Sicilian capital has nearly a million inhabitants, and the fact is that cities all over the world do not get better when they get bigger. Admittedly, Italian social organization provides an antidote to urban sprawl which is not found elsewhere, in that within every city, even one as large as Rome, there are dozens, sometimes...
All my philosemitic friends love this joke, so I’m going to tell it without fear of infamy. The fact is, this is only my second joke in 156 posts, and I have a good sense that by now the gentle reader may well be more tired of my own humor than of other people’s.
While invoking Conrad or Nabokov would be a bit of overkill, the fact is that passing for a native in a language other than one’s mother tongue – in my own case, moreover, a native whose literary persona is distinctly curmudgeonly – invites comment. In particular, it is often said that learning a foreign language any time after puberty, as was Stalin’s case with Russian, condemns the learner to a lifetime of subtle humiliations. Stefano, a friend from London who has been almost absurdly kind to me over the years, has now got it into his head that he wants...
I was raised in a world of sedentary feats, in a cultural microcosm which deliberately undervalued experience. More than that, it treated experience as a kind of monstrous blemish upon the face of thought, a defect that was deemed the more ungainly for being the more noteworthy, unexpected, or rare
In summertime one eschews politics. The blazing sun doesn’t tolerate reflection; one is already plenty hot under the collar; and the wiles of politicians are as nothing when at last you plunge into the emerald sea. Still, out of the corner of your eye you note things from that other, autumnal world, promising yourself to think about them at greater length once the days get shorter.
The hotter it gets, the harder it is to write anything here. I am now back in Palermo, and it’s quite astonishing what a difference just a few graduations on Fahrenheit’s scale can make. In Pietrasanta, where as the gentle reader may remember I have just spent nearly two weeks, one can effortlessly ratiocinate – in the shade, if not in the sun.
