Poets From Italy

"Hoc Matthaeus agens hominem generaliter implet; Marcus ut alta fremit uox per deserta leonis; Iura sacerdotii Lucas tenet ore iuuenci; More uolans aquilae uerbo petit astra Iohannes."

"Dem Polyklet das Maß, und Phidias das Eisen gab."

"The task of theodicy was accomplished at the very moment it disappeared, not because it failed but because it succeeded completely. In the final analysis, it made the very notion of evil disappear."

"If you steal, they arrest you; if you say that God exists, it's just an opinion. That has always amazed me."

"I equally deplore the triumphalism of Kant and, in general, of those philosophies which, finding it necessary to start from the self, praise it as if it were a great achievement and not the miserable fate that has befallen us."

"We know the ‘reductio’ of all things in God by another name. In those who die, the infernal force, or, let's put it this way, the dear old essence of the world, is revealed ‘eo ipso’."

"A righteous man is one who knows this: that he must annul God daily so that the measure of eternal justice may be fulfilled daily."

"If Karl Kraus had written ‘'Capital’', he would have done so in three lines."

"Why do I insist on calling myself a “philosopher” even though neither philosophers want me nor I want them? Because I entered this discipline, with its venerated rules, as a child and my loyalty has never wavered. For more than fifty years I have studied it without distraction. I have grasped its secrets and reticence, I have seen its exaltations and declines, its excesses and forgetfulness. Philosophers on the altar and then hurled down. I witnessed their reign and the dominance of their ideas, and I studied it more than that of leaders and commanders. I had lasting loves, I imitated models (but how can one imitate the Idea, alas). I grew old there. I know three or four things about it better than my contemporaries. I have nothing more to add."

"Modesty is the vile success of those who annul themselves, but only a little, and in this way stand out."

"I define thinking as paying attention to everything that is not oneself, or paying attention to oneself as if one were not oneself. Because of the misunderstandings this causes, I tend to use “being attentive” instead of “thinking,” and ‘attention’ instead of “thought.” One of the benefits would be to leave “thought” in its current usage. The idea of effort connected with it would be well explained by the concept of attention that is implicit in it. I then define idea as the gap between us and things. I am taken aback when I hear people say that ideas and things are identical. It is the power of this gap that defines the ability to think."

"One's own cognitive destiny (not the ‘letter on the subject’) leads far away. Asking a question and reading a book—what could be more foolish?"

"For physics, the meaning of the world lies in its end. The gaze that relies on physics sees things from the point of view of their end. This reverses the fundamental attitude of the individual. In the light of physics, it is not the origin but the end that is the goal. To see everything in the light of this, with life already destroyed, everything in eternal stillness, is to see it as it will one day appear. But it already appears today to those who can discern its morphological contemporaneity with us. It is a matter of already seeing the world in the light of this final catastrophe and referring to it as contemporaries from now on."

"Natural theology, as a “natural disposition,” belongs to blind spontaneity, to brute human nature. But at the same time, it reminds us that here there is only the lowest being. The same thing implies the blind formality of the disjunctive syllogism which, if we want to tell it like it is, leads us obtusely to conceive the outrageous idea of God. With this impiety, natural theology begins and ends."

"I am me and Sicily. I cannot ignore or exclude it, I would be guilty of a poorly constructed abstraction."

"I am not an intellectual, I am a cleric. An intellectual is someone who takes sides with extremely political values. A cleric, on the other hand, is someone who strives to follow values that are universal."

"It bothers me when people speak ill of Sicily, but they speak ill of it because their judgment is not based on fact, it is poorly motivated, it is rather something unrequited, a resentment."

"Hegel called it spirit, we call it culture. Culture is a negative definition, a jumble of things, made for the most varied purposes, not to provide us with a concept of spirit. Ernst Cassirer wrote “For a Philosophy of Culture,” but it was a masked, reduced, debased philosophy of spirit."

"Someone said that only God could have written the ‘Ethica’. Believe me, he was wrong. Not even God. In fact, the impossibility of the Ethica being written is nothing other than the impossibility of the world being created, which the Ethica demonstrates perfectly. (p. 100)"

"The light emanating from Spinoza, Colerus explained, was no less than sunlight. I suspected that heaven and earth had conspired to create this simile. Yet there is a less fortuitous reason why I will never fail to mention Spinoza's name. By disappearing before his own work, he bound himself to it forever. Where, in fact, are the traces of a living being in the ‘’Ethica‘’? Can anyone point out a place where even his shadow is present? But doesn't this little bit of reality seem to be his greatest attribute? This, then, is what Spinoza did, and the reason why we must remember him. He managed not to be the ‘author’ of the ‘'Ethica’'. (p. 100)"

"The first comer who wants to have his say boasts the right to independent thought, which he has been educated to believe in. Let him speak: he will hang himself."

"How can we still bear to call ourselves living—we who are dying!"

"True discipline in matters of the intellect is a ruthless intransigence against the spirit of discussion. Every concession made in the name of mutual equality is a betrayal of the truth, over which courtesy prevails. Thinking divides."

"Pessimistic discourse belongs to the genre of oratory, because it presupposes an audience that can shout and get excited."

"It is this unchanging world within a changing society that philosophy, without excessive amazement, must reflect."

"That there is nothing worse than the world does not need to be proven."

"The truth, the task of those who deal with philosophy, is not the dialogue between two people who philosophize, but a silent nod that is addressed to the designated victim."

"One cannot be reactionary because there is nowhere to return to; one cannot be progressive because there is nowhere to go."

"Theology is not the science of salvation, but of perdition."

"Here we see an attempt to construct a public theology—or rather, if we may borrow a stylistic feature from a great memory, a European public theology. If the age of theology appears to be over, or if only its shadow remains, it is because the dull intellects that have dealt with it (with a few exceptions) carry within them the worm that has gnawed away at the discipline. As if it had to follow the fate of the religion to which it was subjugated. The very fall of religion, now only an object of faith and hope – squalid supports of our uncertain destiny – was to favor it and clear the field of any misunderstanding. That God exists is just a sinister little fact. Nothing more. (Given the way things are going, it was to be expected)."

"We forgive those who have offended us because that evens the score: one offense each. But the latter is deadly."

"An idea does not seem truly reliable to me unless it also satisfies my senses."

"Discos are little nirvanas where the solemn roar of rock music allows the son of Siddhartha to savor the little nothingness. To not be for a little while is all that is asked. Little ‘nothings’ that the life of today's individual needs in order to be reborn and live another week."

"The art of philosophizing comes to light thanks to the mimetic behavior of those who practice it."

"And so he became a writer. Well done. Every now and then he will come back for holidays, perhaps to see his family, and he will criticize us fiercely because he lives in civilization. But there is one thing he does not know, that this land, like the Ionia of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, is magical, and always calls back those who belong to it, as if exercising a right. The law of belonging. And even for him, one day the return will be inevitable. It will be the climate, the light, the air... An almond granita!"

"[About Angelo Scandurra ] With his language, this poet skins things alive. Imagination does not deal with current affairs but knocks imperiously on the doors of the universe. The image of an enormous spider grows before our eyes. The spider with which Spinoza plays, throwing flies at it and laughing, evokes in the philosopher the image of the ‘orto divinus’, whose insistent geometricity is the implacability of a God without passions. Like an enormous mass looming over terrified beings. In our poet, the spider is a ‘grumpy and cunning god’. The overbearing image, however, is not satisfied. The theme looms behind the courtesies of a man of the world. The poet is always vigilant. Whether with sharp lashes or caresses, he takes us from behind. As in an ambush in which we risk our prudent tranquility. Old sensations stir from afar, worn-out emotions are reawakened, and in the end we encounter ourselves."

"The mafia itself does not bring anything to mind. Like the homeland, the dead of Solferino. Ancient things. [...] Sciascia was a civil writer, a schoolteacher who wanted to teach us good social manners. But revisiting him today is like rereading Silvio Pellico. His function has been exhausted. We no longer need Sciascia. We need a new reflection, another Sicilian consciousness."

"Where the insular element dominates, it is impossible to save oneself. Every island waits impatiently to sink. A theory of the island is marked by this certainty. An island can always disappear. A talactic entity, it is supported by the waves, by the unstable. The metaphor of the ship applies to every island: shipwreck looms over it. The insular feeling is a dark impulse towards extinction. The anguish of being on an island as a way of life reveals the impossibility of escaping it as a primordial feeling. The desire to disappear is the esoteric essence of Sicily. Since every Sicilian would not have wanted to be born, he lives like someone who would not want to live: history passes him by with its hateful noises, but behind the tumult of appearances lies a profound quiet. Every story is vanity of vanities. The presence of catastrophe in the Sicilian soul is expressed in its vegetal ideals, in its historical taedium, a kind of nirvana. Sicily exists only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Only in the happy moment of art is this island real."

"The singer must convince others of his ideas. Unlike the philosopher, however, he can do so without arguments."

"I got everything I wanted out of life, now everything that contradicted me or my way of thinking, for example my family, has disappeared: I have been living alone for years."

"True life is the life of the mind."

"In ‘industrial’ music, the irreversibility of time is immanent. It is entropic music, music that destroys itself. Pop music is the epitome of the self-dissolution of music. And yet it is the only form of music that makes sense to everyone. On the edge of the abyss, Mahler composes ‘The Song of the Earth’ but hums a Neapolitan song."

"You agree, however, that when everyone begins: Baruch Spinoza was born here or there, on such and such a day and year, and only then do they talk about the ‘’Ethica‘’, you agree, admit it, that these are only rumors. If anything, we should start with his death, or when it began, and work backwards. We should say how it was that this man began to disappear on a given day. (p. 101)"

"As Spinoza gradually got rid of himself, the ‘’Ethica‘’ was born. This is the opposite of being its author. In order to write the ‘'Ethica’', he had to cease to exist. To be more precise, we should say that a certain Baruch Spinoza, who did not exist, wrote the ‘'Ethica’'. (p. 101)"

"We drag ourselves through the streets at night and talk to ourselves. Dialogue flourishes during the day and echoes with its ignoble dealings. At night, we monologue. Like kings."

"What is different about beauty is its destructive effect. The joyful tension of a poem bursts your poor heart, if it enters you. You are the victim who devoutly welcomes the sharp knife with which beauty sacrifices you. No one must be where beauty is, it seems to say, and with a disdainful gesture it turns its back on you. Those who see the face of beauty die, yes, but not in despair."

"The beautiful lies in the very moment when one senses that beauty is no longer. Forever now, perhaps."

"The best is nothing more than reality as it is. This was Hegel's pessimism."

"[About the relationship with Sicily] As far as I am aware—and I can only answer for this, not for so-called unconscious things, which I do not presume to investigate—I have no “relationships,” it is rather the extension of my skin [...] I have written something about Sicily. But as for living here, I must say that I feel at home, I have an immediate connection. As a boy, I lived in Lentini, where I was born—there were no gardens to replace the small boarding houses—my father was a pharmacist, my uncle was a lawyer and owned some land in the countryside, where we would go from time to time. It was a very rich land, where archaeological finds were later made, and so I found myself playing with bones — those of the Greeks, the Graeculi, of all those who had lived there or had passed through (you can find this in one of my short poems...); well, I felt at home, I feel at home there."

"That ‘I’ should be governed: this is where the scandal of politics begins. Therefore, in examining my aversion to it, I intend to examine the idea in relation to those who make it their profession, and then both in relation to my spirit. It seems obvious when viewed from the outside. But examined in relation to my spirit, or to any spirit, the idea that someone should ‘take care’ of me (this person should in fact be the ‘politician’) never ceases to amaze me. That I should be governed, that is where the scandal lies. My spirit's aversion to this idea is total."