At the heart of our time, there’s a night, a vertigo. As there was Dante’s journey, so now there is the journey of Rimbaud. There is, in the heart of our time an “insignificant” (“adolescent” say those who, protected by an assumed maturity, want to dodge its blows) night or season in Hell. In the heart of modernity (and of what it brings into question) there’s a poet in hell. There already was one, of course. In fact, there was a poet in hell-purgatory-paradise. But now that we are distanced from the fear and trembling in front of Mystery that the Christian era recognized in all circumstances, now that the heart marvels at the smoky streets of the city, marvels at absinthe and at the metaphysical revolution (and since the refuge of an education by now respected only formally has been destroyed), now the heart suffers from boredom with itself and when it reaches the threshold of the unknown it “collapses” and loses the sense of “visions” that open up to it there as he says in the famous “letter of the seer.” It is not by chance, as we are taught by the greatest living Italian poet, that the young poet of Charleville is the only one who can draw near to the Florentine exile with a special kind of proximity-distance relationship. They are two poets, two journeys where the author and the character coincide, where, that is to say, experience counts. And in this place all presumed truths are put to the test of experience. Because of this they are closer to the reader. It should not be forgotten that A Season in Hell (“relation d’un combat spirituel”) is the only book that Rimbaud expressly wanted published. A vertigo in the heart of Europe, a coming and going that is always seeking, a continual leaning towards the possible. There’s a man “mystique à l’état sauvage” who, the day before his death asks the Messaggeries Marittimes what time he should be carried on board to set off again. If it’s true that intellectual pride was the poison that closed the human heart and reason to a sense of mystery, if it’s true that Baudelaire marks the beginning of modernity because he sings of Ennui and a tragically “dual” life with the splendid dirge that many will join (but with less sorrow and more philosophy), it is undeniable that the most moving poetic renderings of those same bored, drugged hearts are to be found in Rimbaud’s Season in Hell. There everything “surrenders.” In that “pagan book” an infirm and perverse gesture sets before us every kind of crisis — that of religion, of love, of science, of memory, of dream, of art – and subjects them to his methodical, yet split-second, test. None of these elements of human experience seem to be capable of helping Rimbaud approach his “destiny of happiness,” to that “salut” which is as desired and imagined as it is mysterious. Clearly the boy is inside a catastrophe, like Hamlet, notes Bonnefoy. “The angels” wrote a young and acute reader of Rimbaud, “know immediately and since always.” Everything surrenders because nothing is enough for the man in search of himself. “I want liberty in salvation. How am I to pursue it?” Exactly in the place where it seems the most dense obscurity of signs and words is felt, the sense of them makes itself clear and self-evident. Rimbaud is anything but obscure. He declares immediately the “key” with which to recapture lost innocence: “charity is this key.” Immediate, precise, almost Paul-like, that is, exactly like St. Paul in his “hymn” (a scandalous climax for another of the poètes maudits, for George Trakl, and for our own Pasolini; it would be interesting to study the strange attraction between Saint Paul and the extremities of literature). A heartbreaking affirmation because of the impossibility that such a key might actually be able to be used and is not simply a dream. In the verses of Rimbaud there’s a “method to nail down our words and our experience of the world to colors.” He does not confront any new themes. He speaks about what everyone speaks about. He turns out to be more useful than Socrates in terms of understanding, today, something of ourselves. Rimbaud who believed everything around him to be of himself, tends toward the motion of leaving. His journey will be neither one of descent, nor an itinerarium mentis, nor a journey around his room. As if to pin down a great and simple allegory, his visionary wandering will end in a journey that is wrapped in mystery. The journey to Africa, more than a post-literary act or a definite rebellion, is none other than the mirror of poetry in its descent into hells, in the groping for things and people in the constant search for “salut” in liberty. “Mon sort dépende de ce livre” he apparently said. He’s a typical rebel, they say, exactly because he didn’t deal with new themes. It’s true. But like Van Gogh, he put – or better, he surprised – things in a light from which they’ll escape only with difficulty. An extreme light that we perceive only in glimpses, confusedly. The light of “faiblesse.” “European culture” wrote Mario Luzi in a good essay on Rimbaud “to which moreover we send the reader who wishes to follow in lapidary detail the kinships and correspondences between the poet of A Season in Hell and the situation of poetry in Italy and Europe, to be quite frank, feels the lack of heresy.” Already Baudelaire had demonstrated an “enormous capacity for suffering” (Eliot). He had restored citizenship to the profound sense of original sin, to that entropy or “fall” that concerns every “élan” and every “beauté.” Most of all in Rimbaud it is not a question of a morbid complacency towards “the limit.” In fact the more acute the perception of a “salut” promised by life (the festival of youth), the more the lack …

“I don’t see you anymore…” According to his friend and biographer Ranieri, in front of whom he was dying in Naples, these were the last words of the poet from Recanati. A tremendous sentence, full of astonished pain, full of lostness. As if to indicate that not even death is to be experienced alone, but with the hope of keeping a beloved face in view. An experience facing this dominant “you” that absents itself. As it was always during his hard life and his violently beautiful poetry. How many of his poems begin with “to see” and are based on “to gaze” or “to contemplate.” The gaze is the threshold on which the I and the other meet. And don’t touch. Ever since he first felt, at a very young age, “the empire of beauty,” Leopardi understood that his life would be dominated by its allure. I don’t see you anymore… even these last words are a grandiose, impossible gesture of love. It is the heartache of an end that leaves traces of every possible beginning. What is life, after all, if it is not seeing you, my love? It’s important not to fall into an overly biographical reading of Leopardi. He himself worried that his philosophy and his poetry would be read in the light of his life (letter to De Simmel) A different description of him appears in each of his three passports: “Short with black hair,” “average height,” “average height, brown hair.” The border-guards of literature often have the same problems as customs agents; when they try to say who we are, they end up seeing things. Even with the suffocating mass of study and analysis of his life and those of his loved ones, his poetry continues to illuminate our biographies more than his own. In fact, instead of explaining or illustrating the life of the one who wrote it, poetry actually disturbs the life of the one who reads it. While in 1938 Riccardo Dusi worked to amass the list of women loved by Leopardi, counting 17 of all different types in the manner of a kind of soccer team, De Benedetti’s warning about the beloved years later was “look for her whoever she is, but you won’t find her.” It is not only the names with literary origins (Nerina, Aspasia) taken from the ancients or from Tasso that are signs of a generalization that surpasses any biographical limit. As Savoca has shown recently, the same poem dedicated to one of the eternal feminine figures, Silvia, conceals in reality one of the most important poetic problems of the late 1920’s. Leopardi’s realm is that of the principle of non-contradiction His thought and his poetry diverge constantly from the fixed possibilities of Aristotle and any mechanistic philosophy. His works don’t trust progress. The question isn’t fought between to be or not to be; it lives in being and non-being. It remains in the contradiction that motivates the “double gaze” of poetry, that causes the inevitable search for impossible happiness. It is this contradictory movement that implies the same conception of man and of his discovery of his life. Leopardi is the man of almost nothing But what is “almost nothing?” Man at the summit of his cognitive process could be “mistaken, almost, for nothing.” It is an epistemological problem tied up with an ontological problem. Even the verb “to mistake[1]” indicates an action (like drowning) in which knowledge and ontology merge. In 1923 Leopardi jots down in his “Zibaldone” some thoughts on the lostness man feels in front of the multitude of stellar worlds when they appear to him at night in the universe: “No thing demonstrates more clearly the greatness and power of the human intellect, or man’s nobility than the power man has to understand, fully comprehend, and forcefully feel his smallness. When he considers the plurality of worlds, he feels himself to be an infinitesimal part of a globe which is a minimal part of one of the infinite systems that make up the world. And in this consideration, astonished by his smallness, feeling it profoundly and examining it intently, man almost mistakes himself for nothing. He almost loses himself in the thought of the immensity of things and he feels as if he has disappeared in the incomprehensible vastness of existence. It is with this act and this thought that he gives the highest proof of his nobility, of the force and immense capacity of his mind. This mind, closed as it is in his small, maimed being, is able to reach toward understanding things far superior to his nature. It can embrace and contain with thought the very immensity of the existence of all things.” This is a very acute consideration: “man ends up almost mistaking himself for nothing.” In this feeling of being almost nothing, man disappears. Yet at the same time he understands that he is the sole point in the universe that has knowledge of everything that exists. In order to be persuaded of what he captures with his mind, Leopardi’s man must also observe it and feel it intensely. To see a theorem clearly is not truth. Truth is not the discovery of an idea. To be persuaded by truth one must feel it. He indicates this clearly in one of his notebook-like meditations which implicates that without a sense of truth (a sense that, like the sense of beauty, can remain unrefined) one of man’s natural capacities dries up and loses influence in his life. The font of every “sense,” of every felt attachment, of every movement of a human being, is traced, by Leopardi to self-love. Self-love for Leopardi in not the egotism of the vainglorious, but the continuous carrying of one’s own “I.” A few years ago my friend Valentino Fossati and I compiled a curious and perhaps not altogether forgettable anthology of Leopardi’s writings on love. (Leopardi, l’amore, Garzanti). What burns all through Leopardian thought is the problem of love, understood especially as love for oneself. …

My first memory of Augustine is connected, I’m not sure why, with my mother’s bed. Perhaps I was flopped down on it when I read a few of his pages for the first time. It was on that same bed of my parents that I wrote my first verses at the age of eight. And then, I don’t know why, but I see Augustine linked to that bed as well. Certainly I encountered him again later, when studying him at University under the extremely silly and extremely wise Professor Manferdini who always arrived to class with her shopping bags and was always newly moved by reading him, her philosopher and lover. But even more importantly, I saw him flicker and heard him murmur behind the pages of some of the poets I counted as friends and mentors. Luzi’s first collection, for example, is called “La Barca” and that amazed and aching vision of the young poet in the grips of time and the mystery of living was woven from a dialogue (not only in a metaphorical sense) with “the restless Bishop of Hippo.” The dialogue persisted in Luzi’s work and in some way got into me as well because I followed in the footsteps of that gentle Florentine with his plundering verses for some time. And then there is Augustine’s presence in Ungaretti’s brazilian lessons and in his angry, incendiary, excavated pages. Is it possible that Ungaretti’s immense and upright love of Petrarch, of a “hard” Petrarch, does not vibrate within him with the same fascination that Augustine’s nostalgic soul exercises on him, Ungaretti, who claims to be a man of pain, a nomad? Life is nostalgia, sang this poet of “The Rivers” with words that he dug out of the abyss. And Thomas S. Eliot, in his aching and intensely exact poetic knowledge in the Four Quartets — and before, even before the Wasteland — in that feverish and delicate investigation into the mystery of time, wanders far enough to invoke that “the fire and the rose are one.” He is crying out to Augustine from the first tremendous and vivid decades of the 20th century. Every poet who has entered into the mystery of verse and into its rich and obscure relationship with time has found the luminous shade of Augustine to converse with. Montale and Leopardi. Or to reverse the situation (thereby taking a risk that, given the material of poetry, isn’t even very risky), it could perhaps be said that Augustine purposely placed himself at a crossroads through which poets must inevitably pass. He is the one who looked for that dialogue. And he looked for it, it must immediately be made clear, because the questions that occupied him concerned nothing less than the health of his soul, the soul of a man and a Christian. He could not avoid an encounter with the problem of poetry. The foot and the verse that are integral to poetry are always interesting for those who seek a path in life. The element that struck me immediately about Augustine’s reflections is that they radiate outwards without ever losing the heat of that primary sun which is the dramatic point of his research and of his own personal case. The aesthetic experience and his comprehension of it were not simply the exercises of the good rector he was. They were also his way of understanding that “carme universalis” that is the only harmony worthy of the human heart, of its abyssal depths, of its spasm. Equaled by few great men, Augustine stands out immense, almost trembling in his vast, steep thought. Yet, in a certain sense he is, at the same time familiar, close. A couple of verses by my friend the French poet Jean Pierre Lemaire that I love recall the Augustinian tension: “there is music in the world/ but if you don’t sing you can’t hear it.” What song, then, positions us for that listening? For Augustine the tension in perceiving the “carme universalis” was connected with the necessity of not remaining tied to an inferior pleasure. In the manner of one who settles for less. And Augustine was not that type. If we do not consider his search for a satisfaction that was forever further away, his relentless reflection on rhythm, on the art of composing music, and in general his reflections that today we would call “aesthetics,” we cannot comprehend his thought. The so-called liberal arts are “sure steps,” as he says in the “Retractiones,” for arriving at an incorporeal reality beginning from corporeal things. Art is a “scientia” for re-uniting with the One. And thus, a terribly important concern. To stop at the “need” for liberal arts is a sign of weakness. It is a prophecy, if you will, of the situation in which we live: we need the liberal arts. But when their work of introducing us to a science of the invisible (that which was sought by Rafael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, or Lorenzo Lotto, as well as the icon painters) is subtracted from them, the arts become entertainment for the educated, or self-referential irony. They are forced into a continual provocation dedicated to tickling social consciousness or producing “ludus” in the rich zones of the planet. The “numerus” to which Augustine dedicates vast and erudite pages of “De Musica” is a form that can be translated as: rhythm, number, music. The sensation that the sound offers us is the beginning of a journey. As an attentive reader of Augustine and his confession as a literary genre, Maria Zambrano would have called this ‘a dawn of thought.’ And Von Balthasar reads the beauty of the “Lay Styles” from Dante to Péguy with an eye to pointing out the continual references – as contact with Augustine but also as ways of going beyond him – in the great works from Dante Alighieri to Péguy. Beauty, for Augustine, is always a felt experience. The opposite of order is nothingness. Evil is like an ugly detail in a work of …