Paul Boccaccio

What is our insomnia but the mad obstinacy of our mind in manufacturing thoughts and trains of reasoning, syllogisms and definitions of its own, refusing to abdicate in favor of that divine stupidity of closed eyes, or the wise folly of dreams.

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But books lie, even those that are most sincere. The less adroit, for lack of words and phrases wherein they can enclose life, retain of it but a flat and feeble likeness. Some, like Lucan, make it heavy, and encumber it with a solemnity which it does not possess; others, on the contrary, like Petronius, make life lighter than it is, like a hollow, bouncing ball, easy to toss to and fro in a universe without weight. The poets transport us into a world which is vaster and more beautiful than our own, with more ardor and sweetness, different therefore, and in practice almost uninhabitable. The philosophers, in order to study reality pure, subject it to about the same transformations as fire or pestle make substance undergo: nothing that we have known of a person or of a fact seems to subsist in those ashes or those crystals to which they are reduced.

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A part of every life, even a life meriting very little regard, is spent in searching out the reasons for its existence, its starting point, and its source. My own failure to discover these things has sometimes inclined me toward magical explanations, and has led me to seek in the frenzies of the occult for what common sense has not taught me. When all the involved calculations prove false, and the philosophers themselves have nothing more to tell us, it is excusable to turn to the random twitter of birds, or toward the distant mechanism of the stars.

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I should say outright that I have little faith in laws. If too severe, they are broken, and with good reason. If too complicated, human ingenuity finds means to slip easily between the meshes of this trailing but fragile net. Respect for ancient laws answers to what is deepest rooted in human piety, but it serves also to pillow the inertia of judges. The oldest codes are a part of that very savagery which they were striving to correct; even the most venerable among them are the product of force. Most of our punitive laws fail, perhaps happily, to reach the greater part of the culprits; our civil laws will never be supple enough to fit the immense and changing diversity of facts. Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom. And nevertheless from that mass of outworn routines and perilous innovations a few useful formulas have emerged here and there, just as they have in medicine. The Greek philosophers have taught us to know something more of the nature of man; our best jurists have worked for generations along lines of common sense. I have myself effected a few of those partial reforms which are the only reforms that endure. Any law too often subject to infraction is bad; it is the duty of the legislator to repeal or to change it, lest the contempt into which that rash ruling has fallen should extend to other, more just legislation. I proposed as my aim a prudent avoidance of superfluous decrees, and the firm promulgation, instead, of a small group of well-weighed decisions. The time seemed to have come to evaluate anew all the ancient prescriptions in the interest of mankind.

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and what is the act of love, itself, if not a moment of passionate attention on the part of the body?

—Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, translated by Grace Frick

§(61) Americanism. Could Americanism be an intermediate phase of the current historical crisis? Could the conglomeration of plutocratic forces give rise to a new phase of European industrialism on the model of American industry? The attempt will probably be made (rationalization, Bedaux system, Taylorism, etc.). But can it succeed? Europe reacts, setting its cultural traditions against “virgin” America. This reaction is interesting not because a so-called cultural tradition could prevent a revolution in industrial organization, but because it is the reaction of the European “situation” to the American “situation.” In reality, Americanism, in its most advanced form, requires a preliminary condition: “the rationalization of the population”; that is, that there do not exist numerous classes without a function in the world of production, in other words, absolutely parasitic classes. The European “tradition,” by contrast, is characterized precisely by the existence of these classes, created by the following social elements: state administration, clergy and intellectuals, landed property, commerce. The older the history of a country, the more have these elements left, over the centuries, sedimentations of lazy people who live on the “pension” left by their “ancestors.” It is extremely difficult to have statistics of these social elements because it is very hard to find the “category” that could encompass them. The existence of certain forms of life provides some indications. The considerable number of large and medium-sized urban clusters without industries is one of these indications, perhaps the most important one. […] Goethe was right to reject the myth of the organic “lazzaronismo” of the Neapolitans and to point out that they are, rather, very active and industrious. The question, however, consists in finding out the real results of this industriousness: it is not productive, and it is not aimed at satisfying the needs of productive classes. Naples is a city where the southern landowners spend the income from their agrarian property; a large part of the city, with its artisanal industries, its peddling trades, the incredible partitioning of the immediate supply of goods or services among the loafers who roam the streets, is structured around tens of thousands of these landowning families, of greater or lesser economic importance, with their retinues of personal servants and lackeys. Another important part is made up of wholesale trade and transportation. “Productive” industry constitutes a relatively small part.

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The phenomenon of Naples is repeated in Palermo and in a whole series of medium-sized and small cities, not only in the South and the Islands but also in Central Italy (Tuscany, Umbria, Rome) and even in Northern Italy (Bologna, to some extent, Parma, Ferrara, etc.). (When a horse shits, a hundred sparrows feed.)

—Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 1 (emphasis mine)
via Anthony [Timesflow]

We have another classical text, Lucretius’ De rerum natura where personal immortality is denied. The most memorable of the arguments given by Lucretius is this: A person complains that he is going to die. He thinks that the future will forget him. As Victor Hugo said, “He will go alone in the middle of the feast / nothing will be missing in the radiant and happy world.” In that great poem, as ambitious as Donne’s, Lucretius uses the following argument: “You are pained because you lack the future. Yet you believe that before you was an infinite time, that, when you were born, the moment had already passed when Carthage and Troy battled to rule the world. It doesn’t matter to you. So why should it matter what shall come? You have lost the infinite past, what matter if you lose the infinite future?” This is what Lucretius says. It’s a pity that I don’t know enough Latin to remember his beautiful lines, which I have been reading lately with the help of a dictionary.

—Jorge Luis Borges, from his lecture entitled, “Immortality”