Lezioni americane

‘Leopardi’s miracle was to subtract so much weight from language that it came to resemble moonlight. The many appearances of the moon in his verse take up only a handful of lines, but they suffice to bathe whole poems in its light or to cast upon them the shadow of its absence.’

‘There are those who believe that words are the means of getting at the world’s substance—its ultimate, unique, absolute substance; that rather than representing that substance, words become it (it is therefore mistaken to call them a means): the word knows only itself, and no other knowledge of the world is possible. Then there are those who see the use of words as a never-ending pursuit of things, an approximation not of their substance but of their infinite variety, a brushing against their manifold inexhaustible surfaces. As Hofmannsthal said, “Depth must be hidden. Where? On the surface” (Die Tiefe muß man verstecken. Wo? An der Oberfläche). And Wittgenstein went even further: “What is hidden . . . is of no interest to us” (Was . . . verborgen ist, interessiert uns nicht). I don’t take such a drastic view—Words connect the visible track to the invisible thing that is desired or feared, like a fragile makeshift bridge cast across the void.’

‘If Gadda’s writing is defined by this tension between rational exactitude and frenetic deformation, these being the foundations of every cognitive process, there was in the same period another writer, Robert Musil—also an engineer and also with a scientific and philosophical background—who expressed the tension between mathematical exactitude and the roughness of human affairs in a completely different manner: fluid, ironic, controlled. A mathematics of single solutions—that was Musil’s dream.’

‘—Lichtenberg wrote: “I believe that a poem about empty space could achieve great sublimity” (Ich glaube, dass ein Gedicht auf den leeren Raum einer großen Erhabenheit fähig wäre). The universe and the void: I’ll return to these two terms, between which swings the aim of literature, and which often seem to mean the same thing.’

‘Among Zhuang Zhou’s many virtues was his talent for drawing. The king asked him to draw a crab. Zhuang Zhou said he would need five years and a villa with twelve servants. After five years he had not yet begun the drawing. “I need another five years,” he said. The king agreed. When the tenth year was up, Zhuang Zhou took his brush and in an instant, with a single flourish, drew a crab, the most perfect crab anyone had ever seen.’

‘—Valéry ruminates on cosmogony as a literary genre rather than as a branch of science, and he produces a brilliant refutation of the idea of a universe, a refutation that is also an affirmation of the mythic power that every image of a universe carries with it. Here, as in Leopardi, the infinite as both attractive and repellent . . . Here too cosmological speculations as literary genre, which Leopardi indulged in with some of his prose “apocrypha”—such as his “Frammento apocrifo di Stratone da Lampsaco” (“Apocryphal Fragment of Strato of Lampsacus”), on the origin and especially the end of our world, which flattens and empties like the rings of Saturn and disperses until it burns up in the sun.’

‘—Leopardi, at the age of fifteen, writes an extraordinarily erudite history of astronomy, in which, among other things, he summarises Newton’s theories. The stargazing that inspired Leopardi’s loveliest lines was not merely a lyrical motif; when he spoke of the moon, he knew exactly what he was talking about.’

‘Borges opens his windows onto the infinite without the slightest busyness, in a style that’s utterly clear and sober and airy—as if telling stories through summaries and glimpses results in the most precise and concrete language, the inventiveness of which lies in its rhythmic variety, its syntactic movement, its unexpected and surprising adjectives. With Borges is born a literature raised to its square and at the same time a literature as the extraction of its own square root: a “potential literature,” as it would be called later in France, but whose heralds may be found in Ficciones—.’

‘If Musil’s Ulrich soon resigns himself to the defeats that a passion for exactitude inevitably entails, Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, another of the century’s great intellectual characters, never doubts the fact that the human spirit can be fulfilled in the most precise and rigorous way. And if Leopardi, poet of life’s pain, displays supreme precision in evoking indefinite sensations that cause pleasure, Valéry, poet of the mind’s impassive rigour, displays supreme precision in having his Monsieur Teste confront pain, making him fight against physical suffering by means of an exercise in geometric abstraction.’

‘We live beneath a continuous rain of images; the most powerful media do nothing but turn the world into images and multiply it with the kaleidoscopic play of mirrors—images that are largely void of the internal necessity that ought to distinguish every image, as a form and as a meaning, as a force that lays claim to our attention, as a wealth of possible meanings. Much of this cloud of imagery dissolves immediately, like dreams that leave no trace in memory, but a sense of irrelevance and uneasiness remains.’

‘The taste for geometrising composition, whose history in world literature might be traced back to Mallarmé, is rooted in the opposition, so fundamental to contemporary science, between order and disorder. The universe dissolves into a cloud of heat, it plummets helplessly into a maelstrom of entropy—but within this irreversible process there may appear zones of order, portions of the existent that tend toward a shape, privileged points from which one may discern a design, a perspective. The literary work is one of these tiny portions in which the existent crystallises into a shape, acquires a meaning—not fixed, not definitive, not hardened into mineral immobility, but alive, like an organism.’