Sicily 7/28/24
I’ve alluded to the idea recently of entering into life uncorrupted.
I think I am coming around to Goethe’s conclusion that Sicily is the clue to everything, in an existential sense. Man, woman, water, stone, air, trees, animals, dusk, dawn; I cannot look out over the mountains without seeing a fairly ideal outcome of this agreement between the raw material from the Creator and its inhabitants.
In Catholic doctrine, the soul enters and leaves the earthly realm in a state of purity. Throughout life there are as many opportunities to make amends as there are opportunities to go wrong, even a little leeway with purgatory.
These are really just two expressions of the same principle: what is of divine origin is perfect, what is of human origin has a tendency to corrupt, but if the latter adheres to the laws of the former, good can come of it.
Few are comfortable anymore with the idea that achieving this good is the purpose of life, leaving us instead with a duty to adhere to the standards of secular society. Except that secular normalcy is simply based on consensus, like money taken off the gold standard. The consensus can draw up a list of its own commandments, moral or amoral, which can change at any time, and it has reduced us to a set of desires to be manipulated, vectors of disease, customers, bootlickers: as much as possible, we are supposed to forget we ever had souls.
For if you remain aware of your first breath outside the womb, and you are able to imagine that one day you will breathe your last, then you will remember that you were once perfect and you will again become perfect, and in fact the soul remains perfect throughout, underneath its patina: you would not defile it by handing it over to the consensus of men.
It’s taken me my whole life to understand this.
It was that winter in the Berner Oberland, a grisly five and a half years ago, that opened a schism between what I had known and what I could choose instead. The moon rose over my life and stayed there while I set about reconciling all of the irreconcilables between the two. But the time has come for the moon to set, for Helios to hitch up his chariot and carry the sun to its high noontime position. As if this summer had followed that winter directly.
It’s about time. Here I am at the eleventh hour burying the hatchet that made me, for you only have up through the end of your 33rd year to belong to your circumstances; thereafter your life belongs to the world.
I fill my bottles at the spring and make my way back up the hill, when lo and behold, there’s a dog on the path around the first corner. I freeze, but it’s plain that he’s very old and completely disinterested in me. I watch for a minute or two as he turns and saunters away, trying to figure out why he seems familiar. But of course, he’s the old chap from the village who’s normally asleep in a crumbling stone barn behind a gate, and every once in a while musters the energy to bark at me. I think Piccola the cat lives at that same house.
Still, I turn around and walk back to the spring, down the hill and onto the main road. I pass Francesco’s house, and he is on his porch as usual. He asks me where my carrello is, my cart, which I’m normally pulling behind me full of water jugs, except that I’ve grown tired of the cart and having been taking a single jug in a backpack instead.
If I only talked to men here, I’d think that I understood no Italian at all. But Francesco’s wife pulls up in her car, and joins him on their porch. Women, unfailingly, simplify their language and slow down their speech so that I can understand; it must have something to do with the maternal instinct. The men speak in idioms at top speed and then look at me like I have two heads while I stand there squinting in concentration, at a complete loss, whereas with women I can hold a conversation, they speak to me like a child and fill the rest in with dramatic hand gestures.
English is beautiful and international, she says, unlike Italian with its complicated Latin grammar.