D'annunzio Quotes

Tutto fu ambito e tutto fu tentato. Quel che non fu fatto io lo sognai e tanto era l'ardore che il sogno eguagliò l'atto.

Il rimpianto è il vano pascolo d'uno spirito disoccupato. Bisogna soprattutto evitare il rimpianto occupando sempre lo spirito con nuove sensazioni e nuove immaginazioni.

Vivere ardendo e non bruciarsi mai

Memento audere semper. Et ventis adversis.

Within a Hell of godless emptiness submit yourself ever more to sleep's spell. All is a dream, all is nothingness: the flower of the world is the asphodel.

When the Devil was a woman, When Lilith wound Her ebony hair in heavy braids, And framed Her pale features all 'round With Botticelli's tangled thoughts, When she, smiling softly, Ringed all her slim fingers In golden bands with brilliant stones, When she leafed through Villiers And loved Huysmans, When she fathomed Maeterlinck's silence And bathed her Soul In Gabriel d'Annunzio's colors, She even laughed And as she laughed, The little princess of serpents sprang Out of her mouth. Then the most beautiful of she-devils Sought after the serpent, She seized the Queen of Serpents With her ringed finger, So that she wound and hissed Hissed, hissed And spit venom. In a heavy copper vase; Damp earth, Black damp earth She scattered upon it. Lightly her great hands caressed This heavy copper vase All around, Her pale lips lightly sang Her ancient curse. Like a children's rhyme her curses chimed, Soft and languid Languid as the kisses, That the damp earth drank From her mouth, But life arose in the vase, And tempted by her languid kisses, And tempted by those sweet tones, From the black earth slowly there crept, Orchids - When the most beloved Adorns her pale features before the mirror All 'round with Botticelli's adders, There creep sideways from the copper vase, Orchids- Devil's blossoms which the ancient earth, Wed by Lilith's curse To serpent's venom, has borne to the light Orchids- The Devil's blossoms- "The Diary Of An Orange Tree

And in the kisses, what deep sweetness! There are women's mouths that seem to ignite with love the breath that opens them. Whether they are reddened by blood richer than purple, or frozen by the pallor of agony, whether they are illuminated by the goodness of consent or darkened by the shadow of disdain, they always carry within them an enigma that disturbs men of intellect, and attracts them and captivates them. A constant discord between the expression of the lips and that of the eyes generates the mystery; it seems as if a duplicitous soul reveals itself there with a different beauty, happy and sad, cold and passionate, cruel and merciful, humble and proud, laughing and mocking; and the abiguity arouses discomfort in the spirit that takes pleasure in dark things.

Half a million dead wops And he got a kick out of it The son of a bitch.

Vivo in una solitudine selvaggia e raffinata, misera e opulenta, dove le passioni ardono s'inceneriscono riardono incessantemente.

Bisogna fare la propria vita, come si fa un'opera d'arte. Bisogna che la vita d'un uomo d'intelletto sia opera di lui. La superiorità vera é tutta qui. Bisogna conservare ad ogni costo la libertà, fin nell'ebbrezza. La regola dell'uomo d'intelletto, eccola: - Habere, non haberi.

You are a Spirit, living in a body, who has a mind. You are a spiritual being having a human experience, not a human being having a spiritual experience.

In vain you beg, in vain you ache, in vain you've opened your wrecked heart wide. Perhaps in heaven the rainclouds quake because we both have cried?

Egli ora sa che io lo amo; lo sa dalla mia bocca. Io non ho più scampo che nella fuga. Ecco dove sono giunta. Quando mi guarda, ha in fondo agli occhi un luccicore singolare che prima non aveva.

I am beyond Right and Left, just as I am beyond good and evil… I am a man devoted to life, not to formulas.

E la mia forza supina si stampa nell’arena, diffondesi nel mare; e il fiume è la mia vena, il monte è la mia fronte, la selva è la mia pube, la nube è il mio sudore. E io sono nel fiore della stiancia, nella scaglia della pina, nella bacca del ginepro: io sono nel fuco, nella paglia marina, in ogni cosa esigua, in ogni cosa immane, nella sabbia contigua, nelle vette lontane. Ardo, riluco. E non ho più nome.

Perché ella voleva partire? Perché ella voleva spezzare l'incanto? I loro destini ormai non erano legati per sempre? Egli aveva bisogno di lei per vivere, degli occhi, della voce, del pensiero di lei... egli era tutto penetrato da quell'amore, aveva tutto il sangue alterato come da un veleno, senza rimedio. Perché ella voleva fuggire? Egli si sarebbe avviticchiato a lei, l'avrebbe prima soffocata sul suo petto. No, non poteva essere... Mai! Mai!

It was the beginning of June; summer was arising out of spring, like an aloe from a field of grass.

Full with frets I die, but not slain by you. My chest drains itself, painlessly. Is all this not blood? Oh, Lord—it's dew! The dawn, weeping, washes over me.

The sun is gone; but the Day—still bending over the mountains, loosens a last flower from her plait. And the sky seems now a higher and holier thing.

You will never known the extent to which my soul is yours.

He wanted to possess not the body but the soul of that woman; and to possess her entire soul, with all her tenderness, all her joys, all her fears, all her anguish, all her dreams, in other words, the entire lief of her soul; and to be able to say: I am the life of her life.

Perché ha parlato? Perché ha voluto rompere l'incanto del silenzio ove l'anima mia si cullava senza quasi rimorso e senza quasi paura? Perché mi ha voluto strappare i veli vaghi dell'incertezza e mettermi in cospetto del suo amore svelato? Ormai non posso più indugiare, non posso più illudermi, né concedermi una mollezza, né abbandonarmi a un languore. Il pericolo é là, certo, aperto, manifesto; e m'attira con la vertigine, come un abisso. Un attimo di languore, di mollezza, e io sono perduta.

The woman bent down to pick up the fallen pomegranate from the grass. It was ripe, it had burst open in the fall, stained her white dress. The vision of the laden barge, the pale island, the flowery meadow returned to her loving spirit along with the Creator's words: 'This is my body...Take and eat...

But the daily tasks and prayers of men, the ancient city tired from having lived too long, the ravaged marble and worn out bells, all those things oppressed by the weight of memories, all those perishable things were rendered humble in comparison with the tremendous blazing Alps that tore at the sky with their thousand unyielding spikes, a vast, solitary city that was waiting, perhaps, for a new race of Titans.

The heat of his night time fever was being brushed away entirely by the breeze as the light mists evaporated. The same process that was happening around him, was happening within him too. He was being reborn with the morning.

C'è chi cammina in mezzo a un popolo come in mezzo a una foresta d'alberi tutti eguali, indifferente; ma c'è qualcuno, continuamente ansioso, che cerca in ogni volto la muta risposta a una muta domanda. Per costui non ci sono su la terra stranieri.

It was like a Stygian plain, like a vision of Hades: a land of shadows, vapours and water. Everything was going misty and disappearing like spirits. The moon was enchanting and pulling at the plain just as she enchants and pulls at the sea, drinking all that vast earthly dampness from the horizon with her silent, insatiable throat.

Se il teatro dell’amore era immutato, perché sarebbe mutato l’amore?

Il loro amore cresceva col fieno, e il fieno s'alzava, s'alzava, ondoso

Ma in un pomeriggio di agosto alla pineta ci tornò con un branco di tacchini cercando ombra, e ci trovò l'amore

¿Qué importa si soy derrotado en el espacio, si sé que estoy destinado a vencer en el tiempo?

il verso è tutto e può tutto.

Hold me, O Night, with motherly affection, While the wan earth wakes with a misty yawn. By my blood will be born the dawn and from my fleeting dream—the undying sun!

They remained silent, while the bronze tolling passed over their heads so powerfully that they seemed to hear it in the very roots of their hair like a quiver of their flesh.

That which at twilight had appeared to be a silvery sea-god's palace, a structure of twisted sea-shapes, was now a temple built by the cunning genies of Fire.

Radian. The prisoner's name is Radiana. Who is keeping her prisoner? Time, Stelio. Time is guarding the doors with his scythe and his hour-glass, as in all those old prints...

In faith I hear a whisper in the air as it sweeps: secrets sparkling from the waters unto the shore; but the wind does not stir upon the deeps, the poets' mandolas play no more.

Devíamos sempre aprender a amar-nos; é o único romance que dura a vida inteira.

If a 'superman' undoubtedly constitutes a central idea of the whole of Nietzschean thought, it is in terms of a 'positive superman', it is not that grotesqueness in the style of d’Annunzio, nor the 'blond beast of prey' (this is one of Nietzsche’s poorest expressions) and not even the exceptional individual who incarnates a maximum of the 'will to power', 'beyond good and evil', however without any light and without a higher sanction. The positive superman, which suits the 'better Nietzsche', is instead to be identified with the human type who even in a nihilistic, devastated, absurd, godless world knows how to stand on his feet, because he is capable of giving himself a law from himself, in accordance with a new higher freedom.

many impressions to seize and hold, familiar loved façades, balconies, windows, water lapping the cellar steps of decaying palaces, the little red house where D’Annunzio lived, with its garden—our house, Laura called it, pretending it was theirs—and too soon the ferry would be turning left on the direct route to the Piazzale Roma, so missing the best of the Canal, the Rialto, the further palaces.

The protagonist of Pleasure, Andrea Sperelli, is an alter ego of the young D’Annunzio: a poet and refined aesthete, a dandy, a seducer, a slave to beauty and pleasure, utterly immoral and yet curiously appealing.

gli sorrise d’un sorriso cosí tenue, direi quasi cosí immateriale, che non parve espresso da un moto delle labbra, sí bene da una irradiazione dell’anima per le labbra, mentre gli occhi rimanevan tristi pur sempre, e come smarriti nella lontananza d’un sogno interiore. Eran veramente gli occhi della Notte, cosí inviluppati d’ombra, quali per una Allegoria avrebbeli forse imaginati il Vinci dopo aver veduta in Milano Lucrezia Crivelli.

La convalescenza è una purificazione e un rinascimento. Non mai il senso della vita è soave come dopo l'angoscia del male; e non mai l'anima umana più inclina alla bontà e alla fede come dopo aver guardato negli abissi della morte.

O little sliver of moon waning that shines on waves desolately reigning, O little sliver of silver, what mass of dreams swells here towards your gentle glow! Fleeting breaths of foliage, sighs of flowers from the woods exhale to the sea: no song, no cry, no sound pierces the vast silence. Oppressed by love, by pleasure, the world of the living falls asleep… O little sliver waning, what mass of dreams swells here towards your gentle glow! (Trans. Michael Shindler)

In faith I hear a whisper in the trees, a bitter odor billows toward my face; but in the open azure there is not a breeze, the peaks all sleep in a hazy light’s embrace. Alike a veil of dreams it falls in beams and into my vigil breaks; a sweet languor within me sprawls… My heart itself—it wakes! In faith I hear a whisper in the air as it sweeps: secrets sparkling from the waters unto the shore; but the wind does not stir upon the deeps, the poets’ mandolas play no more. (Trans. Michael Shindler)

The dawn divides all light from shadow, and all my sensuousness from desiring. O sweet stars, now’s come the hour of dying. A higher love from heaven lets you go. Burning eyes, O you—fated to fade away. Sad stars, snuff yourselves while you’ve pure light! Die, I must. I’ve no wish to see the day, for I do so love my dream and the night. Hold me, O Night, with motherly affection, While the wan earth wakes with a misty yawn. By my blood will be born the dawn and from my fleeting dream—the undying sun! (Trans. Michael Shindler)

he had the sudden thought of holding Donna Maria’s hands in his, to rest his forehead against her heart and feel her console him wordlessly, mercifully. That need for pity, refuge, sympathy, was like the last piece of the soul that did not resign itself to perishing.

He followed the glances of some of them like a ray of love directed at a woman seated somewhere, engrossed in her own thoughts, made languorous by secret delights and softened in some impure way, with a snow-white face in which her mouth opened like a hive damp with honey.

She has a great and rare virtue: she is cheerful, but she can understand the sufferings of others and also knows how to soothe them with her mindful compassion. She is, above all, an intellectual woman, a woman of refined tastes, a perfect woman, a friend who is not a burden. She takes perhaps a little too much pleasure in witticisms and clever phrases, but her arrows always have a golden point and are shot with inimitable grace. Certainly, among all the worldly ladies I have known, she is the finest; among all my friends, she is my favorite.

In vain you beg, in vain you ache, in vain you’ve opened your wrecked heart wide. Perhaps in heaven the rainclouds quake because we both have cried? This pain of ours is without a wing. The fainthearted cry can never fly. Weep and pray! What god is coming by the path of the stars up high? Abandon yourself to the dust and upon it fall in surrender. Our great mother is ever so just to every sinner who kisses her. Within a Hell of godless emptiness submit yourself ever more to sleep’s spell. All is a dream, all is nothingness: the flower of the world is the asphodel. (Trans. Michael Shindler)

Count Andrea Sperelli-Fieschi of Ugenta, the sole heir, continued the family tradition. He was, in truth, the ideal type of young Italian gentleman of the nineteenth century, the legitimate defender of a lineage of gentlemen and elegant artists, the last descendant of an intellectual race. He was, as it were, completely impregnated with art.

A strange sentimental excitement had overcome him; all the lyrical peaks of his spirit had ignited and were flaming; the hour, the light, the place, all the surrounding things suggested love to him; from the farthest end of the sea right to the humble maidenhair fern of the fountains, a single magical circle was being drawn; and he felt that its center was that woman.

If they told me right now to abandon all vanity and all pride, every desire and every ambition, any dearest memory of the past, the sweetest future enticement, and to live uniquely in you and for you, without any tomorrow, without any yesterday, without any other bond, without any other preference, out of the world, entirely lost in your being, forever, until death, I would not hesitate, I would not hesitate. Believe me. You have looked at me, spoken with me, and smiled and answered; you have sat beside me, and you have been silent and thought; and you have lived, alongside me, your eternal existence, that invisible and inaccessible existence that I do not know, that I will never know; and your soul has possessed mine right down to the depths, without changing, without even knowing it, like the sea drinks a river... What does my love do for you? What does love do for you? It is a word that has been profaned too many times, a sentiment that has been falsified too many times. I do not offer you love. But will you not accept the humble tribute of religion that the spirit addresses to a nobler and higher being?

The Montreux Palace Hotel was built in an age when it was thought that things would last. It is on the very shores of Switzerland's Lake Geneva, its balconies and iron railings look across the water, its yellow-ocher awnings are a touch of color in the winter light. It is like a great sanitarium or museum. There are Bechstein pianos in the public rooms, a private silver collection, a Salon de Bridge. This is the hotel where the novelist Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov and his wife, Véra, live. They have been here for 14 years. One imagines his large and brooding reflection in the polished glass of bookcases near the reception desk where there are bound volumes of the Illustrated London News from the year 1849 to 1887, copies of Great Expectations, The Chess Games of Greco and a book called Things Past, by the Duchess of Sermoneta. Though old, the hotel is marvelously kept up and, in certain portions, even modernized. Its business now is mainly conventions and, in the summer, tours, but there is still a thin migration of old clients, ancient couples and remnants of families who ask for certain rooms when they come and sometimes certain maids. For Nabokov, a man who rode as a child on the great European express trains, who had private tutors, estates, and inherited millions which disappeared in the Russian revolution, this is a return to his sources. It is a place to retire to, with Visconti's Mahler and the long-dead figures of La Belle Epoque, Edward VII, d'Annunzio, the munitions kings, where all stroll by the lake and play miniature golf, home at last.

The Duc de Guermantes was not overpleased by these offers. Uncertain whether Ibsen and D’Annunzio were dead or alive, he could see in his mind’s eye a tribe of authors, playwrights, coming to call upon his wife and putting her in their works. People in society are too apt to think of a book as a sort of cube one side of which has been removed, so that the author can at once ‘put in’ the people he meets

In the austere pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes he carefully explained to his readers that d'Annunzio's lewdness must not be confused with the obscenities of Zola, whereat Ouida protested that they were alike in their complacent preoccupation with mere filth. The Frenchman is the sounder critic, it must be said, for while d'Annunzio frequently parallels some of the most unclean—in the literal, not the moral sense—scenes and incidents in Zola, his attitude about sex is as unlike Zola's as that of the late W. D. Howells. Only in "Nana" did Zola describe the life and emotions of a woman whose whole life is given up to love, and then, as we know, he chose a singularly crude and professional person, using her career as a symbol of the Second Empire. D'Annunzio has never described women with any other reason for existence but love, yet none of his heroines has poor Nana's uninspiring motives.

Tutti quegli oggetti, in mezzo a’ quali egli aveva tante volte amato e goduto e sofferto, avevano per lui acquistato qualche cosa della sua sensibilità. Non soltanto erano testimoni de’ suoi amori, de’ suoi piaceri, delle sue tristezze, ma eran partecipi. [...] Come una fiala rende dopo lunghi anni il profumo dell’essenza che vi fu un giorno contenuta, cosí certi oggetti conservavano pur qualche vaga parte dell’amore onde li aveva illuminati e penetrati quel fantastico amante.

E al risveglio improvviso dal sonno secolare noi vedemmo raggiare un altro cielo; udimmo altre voci, altri canti; udimmo tutti i pianti umani, tutti i pianti umani che la Terra nel suo cerchio rinserra. Udimmo tutti i vani gemiti e gli urli insani e le bestemmie immani. Udimmo taciturni la querela confusa. Ma ne l'anima chiusa l'antichissimo sogno, che fluttuava ancòra, ebbe una nuova aurora. E vivemmo; e ingannammo la vita ricordando quella morte, cantando dei miseri veduti, degli amori goduti, degli aromi bevuti. - "I poeti

Darwin and Nietzsche were the common spiritual and intellectual source for the mean-spirited and bellicose ideological assault on progress, liberalism, and democracy that fired the late-nineteenth-century campaign to preserve or rejuvenate the traditional order. Presensitized for this retreat from modernity, prominent fin-de-siècle aesthetes, engages literati, polemical publicists, academic sociologists, and last but not least, conservative and reactionary politicians became both consumers and disseminators of the untried action-ideas. Oscar Wilde and Stefan George were perhaps most representative of the aristocratizing aesthetes whose rush into dandyism or retreat into cultural monasticism was part of the outburst against bourgeois philistinism and social levelling. Their yearning for a return to an aristocratic past and their aversion to the invasive democracy of their day were shared by Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose nostalgia for the presumably superior sensibilities of a bygone cultivated society was part of their claim to privileged social space and position in the present. Although they were all of burgher or bourgeois descent, they extolled ultra-patrician values and poses, thereby reflecting and advancing the rediscovery and reaffirmation of the merits and necessities of elitism. Theirs was not simply an aesthetic and unpolitical posture precisely because they knowingly contributed to the exaltation of societal hierarchy at a time when this exaltation was being used to do battle against both liberty and equality. At any rate, they may be said to have condoned this partisan attack by not explicitly distancing themselves from it. Maurice Barrès, Paul Bourget, and Gabriele D'Annunzio were not nearly so self-effacing. They were not only conspicuous and active militants of antidemocratic elitism, but they meant their literary works to convert the reader to their strident persuasion. Their polemical statements and their novels promoted the cult of the superior self and nation, in which the Church performed the holy sacraments. Barrès, Bourget, and D'Annunzio were purposeful practitioners of the irruptive politics of nostalgia that called for the restoration of enlightened absolutism, hierarchical society. and elite culture in the energizing fires of war.

Pullulating in the dim woods—and gently trembling—and dilating in the light, the water ripples; and just now she veils her rite, just now through all her pale veins she shivers in discovering a little valley of nuptials where there are yet in sight the vestiges of corpses that in the delight of love had entwined under Selene’s scrutiny. Selene is dead; the Argives are dead; their wedding beds—abandoned; in the sovereign stand of the night’s silence the water’s tumults cease; but still from time to time I think I hear ahead the gurgling of an urn that a hand pours invisibly in that peace. (Trans. Michael Shindler)

There are two kinds of women in the world: those who savor, and those who don’t. The ones who savor know how to enjoy a good time when it happens. We dig in the claws and ride a rush as hard and as long as we can. And then there are those other gals. I don’t know if they feel guilty about having fun or if they take themselves too seriously—or maybe they’re just afraid they’ll get their hair mussed if they throw their head back and have a good time. Whatever it is, they’ll push back from the table at d’Annunzio’s, still flushed from some masterpiece of chocolate-raspberry bliss, and their first words uttered will involve 'walking it off.

Ella stava diritta, innanzi ai balaustri, con le mani posate su la pietra, con la testa alzata, più pallida di quando, nella mattina memorabile, camminava sotto i fiori. Le lacrime le empivano gli occhi socchiusi, le rilucevano tra i cigli; e sogguardando innanzi a sè, ella vedeva il cielo farsi roseo, a traverso il velo del pianto. Era, nel cielo, una pioggia di rose, come quando nella sera d’ottobre il sole moriva dietro il colle di Rovigliano accendendo gli stagni per la pineta di Vicomile. “Rose rose rose piovevano da per tutto, lente, spesse, molli, a simiglianza d’una nevata in un’aurora.„ La Villa Medici, eternamente verde e senza fiori, riceveva su le cime delle sue rigide mura arboree i molli petali innumerevoli caduti dai giardini celesti.

She was a woman of abundant and varied learning, with an extensive imagination, the colorful speech of those who have seen many countries, lived in diverse climates, met different people. And Andrea felt an exotic aura envelop her form, felt a strange seduction emanating from her, an enchantment composed of the vague phantasms of the distant things she had looked at, of the sights she still preserved in her mind's eye, in the memories that filled her soul. And it was an indefinable, inexpressible enchantment; it was as if she carried in her person a trace of the light in which she had been immersed, of the scents she had breathed, of the idioms she had heard; it was as if she carried within her, mingled, faded, indistinct, all the magic of those lands of the sun.

But then, after a row with his mistress, d’Annunzio fell out of a window

Stelio si soffermò al pozzo indicato dalla Foscarina; si chinò sul margine di bronzo, sentendo contro le sue ginocchia i rilievi delle piccole cariatidi, e scorse nel cupo specchio interiore il riflesso vago delle lontane stelle. Per qualche attimo la sua anima si isolò, si fece sorda ai rumori circostanti, si raccolse in quel cerchio di ombra donde saliva un tenue gelo che rivelava la muta presenza dell'acqua; e sentì la fatica della sua tensione e il desiderio di essere altrove e il bisogno indistinto di trascendere pur quell'ebrezza che le ore notturne gli promettevano e, nell'ultima profondità del suo essere, un'anima segreta che a simiglianza di quello specchio d'acqua rimaneva immota estranea ed intangibile.

I believed that for me there was a possible realization of the dream of all intellectual men: to be constantly unfaithful to a constantly faithful woman.

You must create your life, as you’d create a work of art. It’s necessary that the life of an intellectual be artwork with him as the subject. True superiority is all here. At all costs, you must preserve liberty, to the point of intoxication,” d’Annunzio writes in Il Piacere, an ambiguously autobiographical novel published in 1889. “The rule for an intellectual is this: own, don’t be owned.

Closer attention to beliefs, mindsets and outlooks releases us from ideological and often moralizing categories; it reveals some shared aspirations, hopes, bitterness and dread between left and right, West and East, and apparently clashing ‘isms’. After all, Maxim Gorky, the Bolshevik, Muhammad Iqbal, the poet-advocate of ‘pure’ Islam, Martin Buber, the exponent of the ‘New Jew’, and Lu Xun, the campaigner for a ‘New Life’ in China, as well as D’Annunzio, were all devotees of Nietzsche.

Noi saremo i precursori che non tornano perché vollero recare il messaggio così lungi che, al vespero di un giorno fugace, trapassarono il confine d'eternità e, senza riconoscerlo,nei regni della morte

Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) was one of the key figures of decadentism. This turn-of-the-century trend was an outgrowth of romanticism and carried certain features to and past their breaking point. However, the word "decadent" can be used in two ways. One the one hand, it is a fairly neutral term referring to a certain postromantic trend in the arts running parallel and partly covering styles ranging from Pre-Raphaelitism to symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, and so on, and including artists such as Charles Baudelaire, Jovis Huysmans, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé in France, Oscar Wilde and William butler Yeats in Britain, Gerhard Hauptmann and Stefan George in Germany, and D'Annunzio and Luigi Pirandello in Italy. Sometimes the term has been extended to included even Proust, Mann and James Joyce. On the other hand, the word "decadence" has pejorative connotations. Thus works considered decadent can only too easily be considered to actually promote the excesses they depict in such loving detail. And true enough, at its most excessive , decadentism could lead to indulgence in shameless subjectivity and sensuality, a wallowing in the forbidden and the perverse, morbid interest in sickness and death, a flaunting of moral and social values, fierce antireligiousness and arrogant faith in the rights and possibilities of men supoosedly elect because of racial or cultural superiority and threatened only by undecipherable and pernicious women. In any case, decadence in the arts obviously cannot be separated from its social context: bourgeois society heading toward a crisis at the turn of the century.

Before fascism could become a serious contender, one chief would have to emerge as the “gatherer"—the one able to shove his rivals aside and assemble in one tent all the (nonsocialist) discontented. For the problem at first was not a lack of would-be Führers but a plethora of them. Both Hitler and Mussolini faced rivals at the beginning. D’Annunzio, as we saw, understood how to dramatize a coup but not how to forge a coalition; Hitler’s competitors in post-defeat Germany did not know how to arouse a crowd or build a catch-all party.

I went to the library and found again the books that had changed my life: Sherwood Anderson, Jack London, Knut Hamsun, Dostoevsky, D’Annunzio, Pirandello, Flaubert, de Maupassant. The welcome they gave me was much warmer than the cold curiosity of old friends I met in the town.

La mia tristezza attraeva la sua tristezza, come la luna attrae le acque del mare.

Andrea, seduto da presso, la guardava con gli occhi un poco socchiusi, bevendo per le pupille il fascino voluttuoso che nasceva da lei.

L'anima cupida e forte dei padri acclamanti ai reduci trionfatori del Mare si risvegliava confusamente negli uomini oppressi dal tedio e dal travaglio dei lunghi giorni mediocri; [...] «Conoscete voi, Perdita – domandò Stelio d'improvviso – conoscete voi qualche altro luogo del mondo che abbia, come Venezia, la virtù di stimolare la potenza della vita umana in certe ore eccitando tutti i desiderii sino alla febbre? Conoscete voi una tentatrice più tremenda?»

« [...] non vi sembra che noi seguitiamo il corteo dell'Estate defunta? Ella giace nella barca funebre, vestita d'oro come una dogaressa, come una Loredana o una Morosina o una Soranza del secolo lucente; e il corteo la conduce verso l'isola di Murano dove un maestro del fuoco la chiuderà in un involucro di vetro opalino affinché, immersa nella laguna, ella possa almeno guardare a traverso le sue palpebre diafane i molli giochi delle alghe e illudersi di aver tuttavia intorno al corpo l'ondulazione continua della sua capellatura voluttuosa aspettando l'ora di risorgere.»

Ella provava, anche una volta, un'inquietudine e un timore ch'ella medesima non sapeva definire. Le pareva di smarrire il senso della sua vita propria e d'esser sollevata in una specie di vita fittiva, intensa e allucinante, dove il suo respiro diveniva difficile. Attratta in quell'atmosfera ardente come il campo d'una fucina, ella si sentiva passibile di tutte le trasfigurazioni che l'animatore volesse operare su di lei per appagare il suo continuo bisogno di bellezza e di poesia. Ella sentiva che l'imagine sua propria nel poetico spirito non era di natura diversa da quella della defunta Estate chiusa nell'involucro opalino, pur così evidente da parer tangibile. E l'assaliva quasi una smania puerile di riguardarsi negli occhi di lui, come in uno specchio, per vedervi riflessa la sua sembianza reale.

Egli era giunto a compiere in sé stesso l'intimo connubio dell'arte con la vita e a ritrovare così nel fondo della sua sostanza una sorgente perenne di armonie. Egli era giunto a perpetuare nel suo spirito, senza intervalli, la condizione misteriosa da cui nasce l'opera di bellezza e a trasformare così d'un tratto in specie ideali tutte le figure passeggiere della sua esistenza volubile.

La scuola, per prima, dovrebbe creare dei veri comunicatori, cioè dei docenti che siano in grado di trasmettere nel migliore dei modi il sapere ai loro allievi. Non basta, infatti, essere laureati in Fisica per insegnare Fisica o essere laureati in Lettere per far amare gli autori classici, occorre anche preparazione pedagogica. Sono rimasto allibito quando una studentessa di Pedagogia mi ha detto che i suoi due esami principali (Pedagogia I e Pedagogia II), sui quali avrebbero dovuto basarsi le sue conoscenze pedagogiche, consistevano nella lettura di una quindicina di libri di D'Annunzio e di Nietzsche! La libertà di insegnare è una bella cosa, ma non "insegnare a insegnare" mi pare una follia senza giustificazioni! Anche perché i danni in questo modo si perpetuano, di generazione in generazione.

He [Joseph de Maistre] held grimly unconventional and misanthropic views about the nature of individuals and societies, and wrote with a dry and ironical violence about the incurably savage and wicked nature of man, the inevitability of perpetual slaughter, the divinely instituted character of wars, and the overwhelming part played in human affairs by the passion for self-immolation, which, more than natural sociability or artificial agreements, creates armies and civil societies alike. He emphasised the need for absolute authority, punishment and continual repression if civilisation and order were to survive at all. Both the content and the tone of his writing are closer to Nietzsche, d’Annunzio and the heralds of modern Fascism than to the respectable royalists of his own time.

L'amore è la più grande fra le tristezze umane, perché è il supremo sforzo che l'uomo fa per uscire dalla solitudine del suo essere e sempre in vano.

Figlia della luce, le tue membra raggiano a traverso la veste che sembra nasconderle, come i dardi del mattino a traverso la nuvola.

È triste la vita quando cessa d'essere una Promessa.

L'aria d'intorno a lei brilla e raggia come l'aria intorno a una stella.

Nella più ardente passione, bisogna sempre rimaner *due*, separati, estranei.

We go up to the convent. […] To the right of the entrance, some letters of a mysterious language are traced on the wall. We are told that Michetti invented this language for his personal use. Why? Prison inmates use a secret language among themselves so as not to be understood by their jailers. Obviously, Michetti considered humanity to be totally composed of jailers. […] To show how difficult it is to read this introductory epigraph, we are told that not even Gabriele d'Annunzio succeeded in interpreting it. […] "Who do you think you are — Dante Alighieri?" According to the most reliable version, the epigraph goes as follows: "Whoever brings evil into this house, may he be buried in shit.” It is a legitimate wish and one that, for all we know, Providence has thus far fulfilled. But why not express it in a clearer way? […] The visit to the convent continues. Rooms and corridors are of a virginal whiteness. In the hall where the convent elders assembled for their meals, the credenza has been replaced by a small harmonium. A painting by Sartorio in his "early manner" hangs over a console. [..] The painter has signed with only his initials, without realizing that the initials for “Giorgio Aristide Sartorio” spell the word "gas.

We go up to the convent. […] To the right of the entrance, some letters of a mysterious language are traced on the wall. We are told that Michetti invented this language for his personal use. Why? Prison inmates use a secret language among themselves so as not to be understood by their jailers. Obviously, Michetti considered humanity to be totally composed of jailers. […] To show how difficult it is to read this introductory epigraph, we are told that not even Gabriele d'Annunzio succeeded in interpreting it. […] "Who do you think you are — Dante Alighieri?" According to the most reliable version, the epigraph goes as follows: "Whoever brings evil into this house, may he be buried in shit.” It is a legitimate wish and one that, for all we know, Providence has thus far fulfilled. But why not express it in a clearer way? […] The visit to the convent continues. Rooms and corridors are of a virginal whiteness. In the hall where the convent elders assembled for their meals, the credenza has been replaced by a small harmonium. A painting by Sartorio in his "early manner" hangs over a console. [..] The painter has signed with only his initials, without realizing that the initials for “Giorgio Aristide Sartorio” spell the word "gas." [FROM: Speaking to Cleo (1939)]