Six Memos for the Next Millennium Read Online Free PDF

senza vento
e queta sovra i tetti e in mezzo agli orti
posa la luna, e di lontan rivela
serena ogni montagna.
    O graziosa luna, io mi rammento
che, or volge l'anno, sovra questo colle
io venia pien d'angoscia a rimirarti:
e tu pendevi allor su quella selva
siccome fai, che tutta la rischiari.
    .  .  .  .  .  .  
O cara luna, al cui tranquillo raggio
danzan le lepri nelle selve …
.  .  .  .  .  .  
    Già tutta Paria imbruna,
torna azzurro il sereno, e tornan Pombre
giu da' colli e da' tetti,
al biancheggiar della recente luna.
.  .  .  .  .  .  
    Che fai tu, luna, in ciel? Dimmi, che fai,
silenziosa luna?
Sorgi la sera e vai,
contemplando i deserti, indi ti posi.
    Soft and clear is the night and without wind, and quietly over the roofs and in the gardens rests the moon, and far away reveals every peaceful mountain.
    O gentle, gracious moon, I remember now, it must be a year ago, on this same hill I came to see you; I was full of sorrow. And you were leaning then above that wood just as now, filling it all with brilliance.
    O cherished moon, beneath whose quiet beams the hares dance in the woods …
    Already all the air darkens, deepens to blue, and shadows glide from roofs and hills at the whitening of the recent moon.
    What do you do there, moon, in the sky? Tell me what you do, silent moon. When evening comes you rise and go contemplating wastelands; then you set.
    Have a great number of threads been interwoven in this lecture? Which thread should I pull on to find the end in my hand? There is the thread that connects the moon, Leopardi, Newton, gravitation and levitation. There is the thread of Lucretius, atomism, Cavalcanti's philosophy of love, Renaissance magic, Cyrano. Then there is the thread of writing as a metaphor of the powder-fine substance of the world. For Lucretius, letters were atoms in continual motion, creating the most diverse words and sounds by means of their permutations. This notion was taken up by a long tradition of thinkers for whom the world's secrets were contained in the combinatoria of the signs used in writing: one thinks of the
Ars Magna
of Raymond Lully, the Cabala of the Spanish rabbis and of Pico della Mirandola Even…. Galileo saw the alphabet as the model for all combinations of minimal units …. And then Leibniz….
    Should I continue along this road? Won't the conclusions awaiting me seem all too obvious? Writing as a model for every process of reality…. indeed the only reality we can know, indeed the only reality
tout court
…. No, I will not travel such roads as these, for they would carry me too far from the use of words as I understand it—that is, words as a perpetual pursuit of things, as a perpetual adjustment to their infinite variety.
    There remains one thread, the one I first started to unwind: that of literature as an existential function, the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living. Perhaps even Lucretius was moved by this need, perhaps even Ovid: Lucretius who was seeking—or thought he was seeking—Epicurean impassiveness; and Ovid who was seeking—or thought he was seeking—reincarnation in other lives according to the teachings of Pythagoras.
    I am accustomed to consider literature a search for knowledge. In order to move onto existential ground, I have to think of literature as extended to anthropology and ethnology and my-thology. Faced with the precarious existence of tribal life— drought, sickness, evil influences—the shaman responded by ridding his body of weight and flying to another world, another level of perception, where he could find the strength to change the face of reality. In centuries and civilizations closer to us, in villages where the women bore most of the weight of a constricted life, witches flew by night on broomsticks or even on lighter vehicles such as ears of wheat or pieces of straw. Before being codified by the Inquisition, these visions were part of the folk imagination, or