With great pride, I remember that my first purchase was actually an apparent foolishness and was intended solely to put my new idea immediately into effect. A not-large stock of incense. To me the seller broached the possibility of using incense as a substitute for resin, which was already growing scarce, but, as a chemist, I knew with absolute certainty that incense could never replace resin, which was different toto genere. The way I looked at it, the world was going to reach such a state of poverty that they would have to accept incense as a surrogate for resin. And so I bought! A few days ago I sold a small part of it, and I received the amount I had had to pay out for the whole stock. At the moment I pocketed that money, my chest swelled, as I felt my strength and my health.
The doctor, when he has received this last part of my manuscript, should then give it all back to me. I would rewrite it with real clarity, for how could I understand my life before knowing this last period of it? Perhaps I lived all those years only to prepare myself for this!
Naturally I am not ingenuous, and I forgive the doctor for seeing life itself as a manifestation of sickness. Life does resemble sickness a bit, as it proceeds by crises and lyses, and has daily improvements and setbacks. Unlike other sicknesses, life is always fatal. It doesn’t tolerate therapies. It would be like stopping the holes that we have in our bodies, believing them wounds. We would die of strangulation the moment we were treated.
Present-day life is polluted at the roots. Man has put himself in the place of trees and animals and has polluted the air, has blocked free space. Worse can happen. The sad and active animal could discover other forces and press them into his service. There is a threat of this kind in the air. It will be followed by a great gain… in the number of humans. Every square meter will be occupied by a man. Who will cure us of the lack of air and of space? Merely thinking of it, I am suffocated!
But it isn’t this, not only this.
Any effort to give us health is vain. It can belong only to the animal who knows a sole progress, that of his own organism. When the swallow realized that for her no other life was possible except migration, she strengthened the muscle that moves her wings, and it then became the most substantial part of her organism. The mole buried herself, and her whole body adapted to her need. The horse grew and transformed his hoof. We don’t know the process of some animals, but it must have occurred and it will never have undermined their health.
But bespectacled man, on the contrary, invents devices outside of his body, and if health and nobility existed in the inventor, they are almost always lacking in the user. Devices are bought, sold, and stolen, and man becomes increasingly shrewd and weaker. His first devices seemed extensions of his arm and couldn’t be effective without its strength; but, by now, the device no longer has any relation to the limb. And it is the device that creates sickness, abandoning the law that was, on all earth, the creator. The law of the strongest vanished, and we lost healthful selection. We would need much more than psychoanalysis. Under the law established by the possessor of the greatest number of devices, sickness and the sick will flourish.
Perhaps, through an unheard-of catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. When poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness.
__________
William Weaver has translated novels by Italo Calvino, Giorgio Bassani, Umberto Eco, Elsa Morante, and Luigi Pirandello. He has been the recipient of the National Book Award for Translation, the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize (twice), the John Florio Prize (twice), and the Premio Malaparte. He also writes about theater and opera and teaches at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
Elizabeth HARDWICK is the author of four collections of essays, Sight-Readings, Bartleby in Manhattan, A View of My Own, Seduction and Betrayal, as well as the biography of Herman Melville. She has received the Lifetime Achievement Citation from the National Book Critics Circle and the Gold Medal for Belles-Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS:
PREFACE
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
MAP OF ZENO'S TRIESTE
PREFACE
PREAMBLE
SMOKE
MY FATHER’S DEATH
THE STORY OF MY MARRIAGE
WIFE AND MISTRESS
THE STORY OF A BUSINESS PARTNERSHIP
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience
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