Certain minor miracles – of timeliness, rarity, price – occurred among the bookshops of southern Italy this year. In Rome, I found an Alexandra David-Néel from the private collection of Freya Stark I gifted to Eva; at Dante & Descartes in Naples, a complete reproduction, plates and all, of William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei. Observations on the Volcanos of the Two Sicilies as They Have Been Communicated to the Royal Society of London, a book that sells for $100,000+ (USD), for €65 that she gifted me. A crumbling edition of Amadeo Maiuri’s far less costly, but no less crucial, I Campi Flegrèi: Dal Sepolcro di Virgilio all’Antro di Cuma also, improbably, appeared on a rack at Port’Alba.
I will finish about seventy-five books this year – mostly titles like The Ethics of Earth Art, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity, and The Path of Shadows: Chthonic Gods, Oneiromancy & Necromancy in Ancient Greece. Although I quite liked Cormac McCarthy’s career coda Stella Maris, Mathias Énard’s Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants, etc., none of the new (to me) fictions I read gave me as much pleasure, I think, as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Violins of Saint-Jacques (although the first and last lines of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It are tough to beat). And none affected me so strongly – for whatever lame psycho-meteorological elucidation of my inner weather I might proffer – as Zorba the Greek did.
As I wrote a friend:
This morning, I ran from the center of Naples through the kilometer-long hole in the Posillipo peninsula into Fuorigrotta, and thence across the supervolcano to Lake Avernus: just over 20 km under a blazing late-morning sun, listening to Zorba the Greek, occasionally laughing aloud as I padded along the colossal industrial ruins from Bagnoli Futura to the western limits of Pozzuoli. The sky and sea were blue; the tuff of La Starza, yellow. The face of that tremorous escarpment is festooned with ancient Roman ruins like some coast cliffs are with fossils. I was happy.
That’s weather, not climate, as I said. Days later, I wrote again:
Was feeling especially human last night. Hard to say why. The weather, maybe. Or dead ends in my work. Had had a few too many beers, and there was an intense conversation in Piazza Dante about the war in Ukraine with a guy I know who works the crowd there, an anarcho-communist, that felt almost life or death, and finally erupted into us singing a Bourbon-era Nnapulitano brigand song together, him pointing to the hairs standing erect on his arms. I was fatigued, overheated, not especially clear-minded. At the flat, I actually asked myself, “Is that it?”, and answered by striding back off into the night furnace, bent on reaching the highest point above the city and the sea I could find stairs to. Made it about five miles before I exhausted them (not they me). The last chapters of Zorba the Greek in my earbuds did a number on me up there in the dark: more than once, I actually bayed like a dog or wolf as I climbed. Not out of pain, or even unhappiness. Rather – good as it is to live, even just to be alive – it’s often a hell of a thing when I allow myself to _really_ feel like a body – this aging, broken-down body – in the midst of life. Needless to say, no one paid me any mind. Nor should you.
Chamblissian 