Carlo Levi Quotes

The future has an ancient heart.

The greatest travelers have not gone beyond the limits of their own world; they have trodden the paths of their own souls, of good and evil, of morality and redemption.

Il Futuro ha un Cuore Antico

But the autonomy or self-government of the community cannot exist without the autonomy of the factory, the school, and the city, of every form of social life.

...men, incapable of liberty-who cannot stand the terror of the sacred that manifests itself before their open eyes-must turn to mystery, must hide...the...truth.

read Carlo Levi?

L'altra parola, che ritorna sempre nei discorsi è crai, il cras latino, domani. Tutto quello che si aspetta, che deve arrivare, che deve essere fatto o mutato, è crai. Ma crai significa mai.

There’s a line by the Italian writer Carlo Levi that I think is apt here: “The future has an ancient heart.” I love it because it expresses with such grace and economy what is certainly true—that who we become is born of who we most primitively are; that we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives. I think it’s a useful sentiment for you to reflect upon now, sweet peas, at this moment when the future likely feels the opposite of ancient, when instead it feels like a Lamborghini that’s pulled up to the curb while every voice around demands you get in and drive. I’m here to tell you it’s okay to travel by foot.

The sky was a mixture of rose, green, and violet, the enchanting colors of malaria country, and it seemed far, far away.

Paul Theroux on Blogging, Travel Writing, and Three Cups of Tea Speaking of books that contain an element of travel, Greg Mortenson's bestseller about Central Asia was in the news recently. Were you surprised by the allegations that Three Cups of Tea contained fabrications? No, I wasn't. One of the things The Tao of Travel shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them. For example, everyone loved John Steinbeck's book Travels With Charley. Turns out he didn't travel alone, his wife kept meeting him, yet she was never mentioned in the book. Steinbeck didn't go to all the places he mentioned, nor did he meet all the people he said he met. In other words, Travels With Charley is fiction, or at least half-fiction. As for Three Cups of Tea, I think that philanthropists and humanitarians are even less forthcoming about what they do. I guess this guy did build a couple of schools in Afghanistan, but a self-promoting humanitarian is not someone I have a great deal of trust or belief in. I lived for six years in Africa and I've been to Africa numerous times since then. People build schools for their own reasons—not to improve a country. The people I've known who've done great things of that type—you know, building hospitals, running schools—are very humble people. They give their lives to the project. Missionaries get a bad rap, but I've known missionaries in Africa who were very self-sacrificing and humble and who did great things. They ran schools, hospitals, libraries; they helped people. Some wrote dictionaries and translated languages that hadn't been written down. I saw a lot of missionaries in Africa that were doing that, and you would never know their names; they came and did their work, and now they're buried there. Are there travel books out there that feel especially honest to you? Many of the books I quote in The Tao of Travel feel honest. One of them, really the most heartfelt, is Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi. Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard is a very honest book. Jan Morris has written numerous books, and you can take what she says to the bank. But there are some that just don't feel right. Bruce Chatwin never rang true to me. Bill Bryson said that he would take a couple of people and make them into one composite character. Well, that's what novelists do. If you're a travel writer you have to stick to the facts.

Ma cosa importava se non era autorizzato? Le faceva benissimo: ma doveva agire di nascosto, perché l'Italia è il paese dei diplomi, delle lauree, della cultura ridotta soltanto al procacciamento e alla spasmodica difesa dell'impiego.

They live submerged in a world that rolls on independent of their will, where man is in no way separate from his sun, his beast, his malaria, where there can be neither happiness, as literary devotees of the land conceive it, nor hope, because these two are adjuncts of personality and here there is only the grim passivity of a sorrowful Nature. But they have a lively human feeling for the common fate of mankind and its common acceptance. This is strictly a feeling rather than an act of will; they do not express it in words but they carry it with them at every moment and in every motion of their lives, through all the unbroken days that pass over these wastes.

It was sad to see the peasants' ingratitude. And their superstitions. And their stubbornness. And so on, and so on...a dust-covered and uninteresting skein of self-interest, low-grade passion, boredom, greedy impotence, and poverty.

They were all unconscious worshippers of the State. Whether the State they worshipped was the Fascist State or the incarnation of quite another dream, they thought of it as something that transcended both its citizens and their lives. Whether it was tyrannical or paternalistic, dictatorial or democratic, it remained to them monolithic, centralized, and remote. This was why the political leaders and my peasants could never understand one another. The politicians oversimplified things, even while they clothed them in philosophical expressions. Their solutions were abstract and far removed from reality; they were schematic halfway measures, which were already out of date. Fifteen years of Fascism had erased the problem of the South from their minds and if now they thought of it again they saw it only as a part of some other difficulty, through the fictitious generalities of party and class and even race...All of them agreed that the State should be something about it, something concretely useful, and beneficent, and miraculous, and they were shocked when I told them that the State, as they conceived it, was the greatest obstacle to the accomplishment of anything...We can bridge the abyss only when we succeed in creating a government in which the peasants feel they have some share...Plans laid by a central government, however much good they may do, still leave two hostile Italys on either side of the abyss. The difficulties we were discussing, I explained to them, were far more complex than they realized...First of all, we are faced with two very different civilizations, neither of which can absorb the other...The second aspect of the trouble is economic, the dilemma of poverty. The land has been gradually impoverished: the forests have been cut down, the rivers have been reduced to mountain streams that often run dry, and livestock has become scarce. Instead of cultivating trees and pasture lands there has been an unfortunate attempt to raise wheat in soil that does not favor it. There is no capital, no industry, no savings, no schools; emigration is no longer possible, taxes are unduly heavy, and malaria is everywhere. All this is in large part due to the ill-advised intentions and efforts of the State, a State in which the peasants cannot feel they have a share, and which has brought them only poverty and deserts...We must make ourselves capable of inventing a new form of government, neither Fascist, nor Communist, nor even Liberal, for all three of these are forms of the religion of the State. We must rebuild the foundations of our concept of the State with the concept of the individual, which is its basis...The individual is not a separate unit, but a link, a meeting place of relationships of every kind...The name of this way out is autonomy. The State can only be a group of autonomies, an organic federation, The unit or cell through which the peasants can take part in the complex life of the nation must be the autonomous or self-governing rural community. This is the only form of government which can solve in our time the three interdependent aspects of the problem of the South; which can allow the co-existence of two different civilizations, without one lording it over the other or weighing the other down; which can furnish a good chance for escape from poverty...But the autonomy or self-government of the community cannot exist without the autonomy of the factory, the school, and the city, of every form of social life. This is what I learned from a year of life underground.

In spite of my work and all that I had to do about the house, the days went by with the most dismal monotony, in this deathlike existence, where there was neither time, nor love, nor liberty. One living presence would have been more real to me than the company of infinite numbers of bodiless spirits, constantly staring at me and following me about: the continual magic of animals and things weighed upon me with a funereal enchantment, but the only way to be free of them was to possess a magic even stronger.

My visit was a melancholy one, quite apart from its mournful motive. I had expected tremendous enjoyment from seeing the city again, talking with my old friends, and taking part, if for only a moment, in the busy and complex life with which I was once so familiar. But when I got there I felt isolated, faraway, and unable to adapt myself to the places and persons I had longed to see...Part of me seemed by now foreign to their interests, ambitions, activities, and hopes; their life was no longer mine and it no longer touched me. After a few days, which passed in a flash, I set out again, with no regret...I thought of my feeling of strangeness, and of the complete lack of understanding among those of my friends who concerned themselves with political questions, of the country to which I was now hurrying back...But although they listened with apparent interest, very few of them seemed really to follow what I was saying. They were men of various temperaments and shades of opinion, from stiff-necked conservatives to fiery radicals.

¿Es posible que nuestro siglo haya sido lo que ha sido después de que Dostoievski escribiera Los demonios? ¿De dónde salen Pol Pot y los demás cuando se ha imaginado el personaje de Piotr Verjovenski? ¿Y el terror de los campos cuando Chejov ha escrito Sajalín? ... ¿Y cómo es posible que cuando todo hubo pasado, la tierra entera no leyera La especie humana de Robert Antelme, aunque solo fuera para liberar al Cristo de Carlo Levi, definitivamente detenido en Éboli?

Was this classical form the reminiscence of an ancient art, descended to a popular level, or was it an original and spontaneous re-creation in a language natural to this land, where the whole of life is a tragedy without a stage?

La civiltà tecnologica occidentale, velo dopo velo, sta ormai stendendo il suo anonimo sudario su tutte le culture del mondo, rendendole, almeno esteriormente, meno dissimili dalla nostra. La forza d'urto dell'imperialismo politico ed economico delle nazioni industrializzate è tale che in realtà le popolazioni autoctone sono costrette a capitolare. Non hanno scelta. La resa incondizionata porta con sé la disgregazione sociale, la degradazione morale, l'auto-disprezzo, il disorientamento. Popoli che da sempre si erano considerati il centro del mondo, i prediletti delle divinità, debbono ripiegare a un tratto su un'immagine del tutto opposta di se stessi; ora il loro posto è alla periferia estrema del genere umano: sono i reietti, gli ultimi. La scomparsa progressiva della varietà nelle culture umane non è, come pensavano gli amministratori coloniali e i missionari, un segno luminoso del progresso; al contrario, nasconde un grave pericolo per tutti. Abdicando alla sua diversità a favore di un'unità passiva che può essere solo superficiale ed esteriore, l'umanità regredisce verso gli statici modelli delle società animali e si priva del suo più valido stimolo evolutivo. Levi-Strauss a scritto: "Non bisogna dimenticare che un'umanità confusa in un genere di vita unico è inconcepibile, perché sarebbe un'umanità ossificata".

Once he asked a colleague if he had ever heard of a musician named Carlos San-tain-a; Brin had been asked to introduce him at a concert. “Sergey,” the Googler said, “everyone knows who Carlos Santana is.” “I’ll just say he needs no introduction,” said Brin.)

My life had no base but was hung ridiculously in the air, and the sound of my own voice startled me.

He was, of course, only a dog, an animal like all the rest, but at the same time he had a dual and mysterious nature. I too loved him for his combination of simplicity and variety. Now he is dead, like my father to whom I gave him, and he lies buried under an almond tree overlooking the sea, in Liguria, that land of mine where I can no longer set foot, because those in power, in their fear of all that is sacred, seem to have discovered that I too have a dual nature and am, like my dog, half baron and half lion.

A fresh breeze was blowing from Dalmatia, making tiny whitecaps on the smooth surface of the waves. Vague notions floated through my head: the life of this sea was like man's fate, cast for all eternity in a series of equal waves, moving through time without change. I thought with affectionate sorrow of the motionless time and the dark civilization which I had left behind me.

It was sad to see the peasants' ingratitude. And their superstitions. And their stubborness. And so on, and so on.

Giulia was a mistress of the art of making philters...she knew herbs and the power of talismans; she could even bring about the death of anyone she chose by uttering terrible incantations.

If they have money enough for a war, why don't they repair the bridge across the Agri which has been down for four years without anyone moving a finger to fix it? They might make a dam or provide us with more fountains, or plant young trees instead of cutting down the few that are left. We've plenty of land right here, but nothing to go with it.

In questa terra oscura, senza peccato e senza redenzione, dove il male non è morale, ma è un dolore terrestre, che sta per sempre nelle cose, Cristo non è disceso. Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli.

Malgrado le occupazioni e il lavoro, i giorni passavano nella più squallida monotonia, in quel mondo di morte, senza tempo, né amore, né libertà. Una sola presenza reale sarebbe stata per me mille volte più viva che le infinite pullulanti presenze degli spiriti incorporei, che rendono più greve la solitudine, ti guardano e ti seguono. La continua magia degli animali e delle cose pesa sul cuore come un funebre incanto. E non ti si presentano, per liberartene, che altri modi di magia.

se c’è un modo di essere materno, dove non traspare nessun sentimentalismo, questo era il suo:

La vita è triste, tra quei grattacieli, con tutte quelle straordinarie comodità, e gli ascensori, le porte girevoli, la metropolitana, e sempre case e palazzi e strade, e mai un po’ di terra. Viene la malinconia.

En su texto “El populismo y la política económica de México, 1970-1982”,3 Carlos Bazdresch y Santiago Levy argumentan que “populismo” es una definición poco clara, cargada ideológicamente, pero que desde el punto de vista de la política económica, para ellos se puede resumir en “el uso dispendioso de los gastos públicos, el uso intensivo de los controles de precios, la sobrevaluación sistemática del tipo de cambio y las señales inciertas de la política económica, que tienen efectos deprimentes en la inversión privada”.

Gracias al recién descubierto yacimiento de Cantarell y a un alto crecimiento de la deuda apalancada en ese petróleo recién descubierto, López Portillo tuvo un inusual influjo de recursos. En palabras de Bazdresch y Levy: “Podemos especular: si no se hubiese encontrado petróleo es posible que la economía mexicana hubiese retornado a las políticas macroeconómicas del desarrollo estabilizador, pero con la lección adicional de que ya no podían posponerse las reformas estructurales a la política tributaria, comercial y regional. Pero se encontró petróleo y eso cambió todo”.

Tutti i giovani di qualche valore, e quelli appena capaci di fare la propria strada, lasciano il paese. I più avventurati vanno in America, come i cafoni; gli altri a Napoli o a Roma; e in paese non tornano più. In paese ci restano invece gli scarti, coloro che non sanno far nulla, i difettosi nel corpo, gli inetti, gli oziosi: la noia e l’avidità li rendono malvagi. Questa classe degenerata deve, per vivere (i piccoli poderi non rendono quasi nulla), poter dominare i contadini, e assicurarsi, in paese, i posti remunerati di maestro, di farmacista, di prete, di maresciallo dei carabinieri, e così via. È dunque questione di vita o di morte avere personalmente in mano il potere; essere noi o i nostri parenti o compari ai posti di comando. Di qui la lotta continua per arraffare il potere tanto necessario e desiderato, e toglierlo agli altri; lotta che la ristrettezza dell'ambiente, l'ozio, l'associarsi di motivi privati o politici rende continua e feroce.

Sono passati molti anni, pieni di guerra, e di quello che si usa chiamare la Storia. Spinto qua e là alla ventura, non ho potuto finora mantenere la promessa fatta, lasciandoli, ai miei contadini, di tornare fra loro, e non so davvero se e quando potrò mai mantenerla. Ma, chiuso in una stanza, e in un mondo chiuso, mi è grato riandare con la memoria a quell'altro mondo, serrato nel dolore e negli usi, negato alla Storia e allo Stato, eternamente paziente; a quella mia terra senza conforto e dolcezza, dove il contadino vive, nella miseria e nella lontananza, la sua immobile civiltà, su un suolo arido, nella presenza della morte. – Noi non siamo cristiani, – essi dicono, – Cristo si è fermato a Eboli –. Cristiano vuol dire, nel loro linguaggio, uomo: e la frase proverbiale che ho sentito tante volte ripetere, nelle loro bocche non è forse nulla piú che l'espressione di uno sconsolato complesso di inferiorità. Noi non siamo cristiani, non siamo uomini, non siamo considerati come uomini, ma bestie, bestie da soma, e ancora meno che le bestie, i fruschi, i frusculicchi, che vivono la loro libera vita diabolica o angelica, perché noi dobbiamo invece subire il mondo dei cristiani, che sono di là dall'orizzonte, e sopportarne il peso e il confronto. Ma la frase ha un senso molto piú profondo, che, come sempre, nei modi simbolici, è quello letterale. Cristo si è davvero fermato a Eboli, dove la strada e il treno abbandonano la costa di Salerno e il mare, e si addentrano nelle desolate terre di Lucania. Cristo non è mai arrivato qui, né vi è arrivato il tempo, né l'anima individuale, né la speranza, né il legame tra le cause e gli effetti, la ragione e la Storia. Cristo non è arrivato, come non erano arrivati i romani, che presidiavano le grandi strade e non entravano fra i monti e nelle foreste, né i greci, che fiorivano sul mare di Metaponto e di Sibari: nessuno degli arditi uomini di occidente ha portato quaggiú il suo senso del tempo che si muove, né la sua teocrazia statale, né la sua perenne attività che cresce su se stessa. Nessuno ha toccato questa terra se non come un conquistatore o un nemico o un visitatore incomprensivo. Le stagioni scorrono sulla fatica contadina, oggi come tremila anni prima di Cristo: nessun messaggio umano o divino si è rivolto a questa povertà refrattaria. Parliamo un diverso linguaggio: la nostra lingua è qui incomprensibile. I grandi viaggiatori non sono andati di là dai confini del proprio mondo; e hanno percorso i sentieri della propria anima e quelli del bene e del male, della moralità e della redenzione. Cristo è sceso nell'inferno sotterraneo del moralismo ebraico per romperne le porte nel tempo e sigillarle nell'eternità. Ma in questa terra oscura, senza peccato e senza redenzione, dove il male non è morale, ma è un dolore terrestre, che sta per sempre nelle cose, Cristo non è disceso. Cristo si è fermato a Eboli.

Did you ever read Carlo Levi?” “No.” “You should—if you like Tolstoy. He wrote beautifully about Italian peasants. My people, once. He had a soul like Tolstoy. ‘The future has an ancient heart.’ I think I have that right.