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.
Celeste Dell’Anna, interior designer of genius and my friend of thirty years, is coming to visit us today from Milan, where he lives.
This time around my impression of the town where I had spent four waterlogged years was altogether baleful. Now I was here as a stranger, and this made immersion in the tourist miasma, which locals are trained and equipped to evade, unavoidable and humiliating.
Only the eyes make us feel more vulnerable, more exposed to harm and subject to deterioration, than our teeth. But the eyes at least have eyelids, whereas our teeth stand naked and afraid before every grain of sand, every cherry pit, and every year that passes. Were they of flesh and blood, they would tremble in fear whenever we opened our mouths.
Italians always say the same thing when events like this unfold on their television screens. “The English,” they effuse, “it’s only the English who know how to do it.” The event in question was, in this case, the Coronation of King Charles III, but I’d heard the phrase and observed the facial expression that accompanies it on many a past occasion – funerals, weddings, and whatnot.
Our times reverberate with observations, which are just as often laments, of the ubiquity of certain objects and modes of deportment with which these are associated. I doubt that the umbrella and the bicycle caused as much speculation about the future of the world as the smartphone and the electric scooter do at present, though I recall that a New York Times editorial once condemned the word “automobile” as a neologism combining Greek and Latin roots “which is so near to indecent that we print it with hesitation.”
The English language does not seem to have a single word for “old age,” which exists, for instance, in Russian (starost’) and Italian (vecchiaia). A native speaker can easily spend days or years pondering this lacuna because, whatever its significance, it is significant. We do not say “young age,” we say “youth,” and at once there opens a very specific psychological and ethical panorama. None such exists for youth’s antonym, suggesting that language itself does not so much as bother looking in this direction. Yet how can there be night without twilight?
