Black Swan Read Online Free PDF

place now? And visit this Italy you boast so much about? And then drop by my Italy?”
    “That situation is complicated,” Massimo hedged, and stood up. “Watch my bag, will you?”
    He then departed to the toilet, leaving me to wonder about all the ways in which our situation could be complicated.
    Now I was sitting alone, staring at that corked brandy bottle. My brain was boiling. The strangeness of my situation had broken some important throttle inside my head.
    I considered myself bright—because I could write in three languages, and I understood technical matters. I could speak to engineers, designers, programmers, venture capitalists and government officials on serious, adult issues that we all agreed were important. So, yes, surely I was bright.
    But I’d spent my whole life being far more stupid than I was at this moment.
    In this terrible extremity, here in the cigarette-choked Elena, where the halfragged denizens pored over their grimy newspapers, I knew I possessed a true potential for genius. I was Italian, and, being Italian, I had the knack to shake the world to its roots. My genius had never embraced me, because genius had never been required of me. I had been stupid because I dwelled in a stupefied world.
    I now lived in no world at all. I had no world. So my thoughts were rocketing through empty space.
    Ideas changed the world. Thoughts changed the world—and thoughts could be written down. I had forgotten that writing could have such urgency, that writing could matter to history, that literature might have consequence. Strangely, tragically, I’d forgotten that such things were even possible.
    Calvino had died of a stroke: I knew that. Some artery broke inside the man’s skull as he gamely struggled with his manifesto to transform the next millennium. Surely that was a great loss, but how could anybody guess the extent of that loss? A stroke of genius is a black swan, beyond prediction, beyond expectation. If a black swan never arrives, how on Earth could its absence be guessed?
    The chasm between Massimo’s version of Italy and my Italy was invisible—yet all-encompassing. It was exactly like the stark difference between the man I was now, and the man I’d been one short hour ago.
    A black swan can never be predicted, expected, or categorized. A black swan, when it arrives, cannot even be recognized as a black swan. When the black swan assaults us, with the wingbeats of some rapist Jupiter, then we must rewrite history.
    Maybe a newsman writes a news story, which is history’s first draft.
    Yet the news never shouts that history has black swans. The news never tells us that our universe is contingent, that our fate hinges on changes too huge for us to comprehend, or too small for us to see. We can never accept the black swan’s arbitrary carelessness. So our news is never about how the news can make no sense to human beings. Our news is always about how well we understand.
    Whenever our wits are shattered by the impossible, we swiftly knit the world back together again, so that our wits can return to us. We pretend that we’ve lost nothing, not one single illusion. Especially, certainly, we never lose our minds. No matter how strange the news is, we’re always sane and sensible. That is what we tell each other.
    Massimo returned to our table. He was very drunk, and he looked greenish.
    “You ever been in a squat-down Turkish toilet?” he said, pinching his nose. “Trust me, don’t go in there.”
    “I think we should go to your Italy now,” I said.
    “I could do that,” he allowed idly,“although I’ve made some trouble for myself there… my real problem is you.”
    “Why am I trouble?”
    “There’s another Luca in my Italy. He’s not like you, because he’s a great author, and a very dignified and very wealthy man. He wouldn’t find you funny.”
    I considered this. He was inviting me to be bitterly jealous of myself. I couldn’t manage that, yet I was angry anyway. “Am I