Antonio Gallo's Blog: MEDIUM - Posts Tagged "aeon"

I believe all men ask themselves, at least once in their lifetime, this question. I remember, once I asked this question to someone during a lecture: I was answered that “life is a sexually transmitted condition with a 100 per cent mortality rate”. What we do know for certain is that “we were not once, we are now, and we will not be again”. Life is not a linguistic term and hence has no meaning. Just as if I asked “what is the meaning of lumbago”. At this point, you might as well ask me “Why are you putting this question?”. To be frank, I don’t know. I forgot to ask my parents …

10 July 2015 Ron Bell
Antonio…I very much liked your above explanation of our curiosity over the meaning of life. How very true that we once were not, are now and one day no longer will be. It is the moment that counts, correct?

12 July 2015 Antonio Gallo
Yes, Ron. You’re right, it’s that moment that counts. It did count for my parents who lighted their flame and gave their meaning to my life …

12 July 2015 Ron Bell
Your background is, like my own, quite unique. I admire your wide-ranging interest in so many things. I wish I could speak/read Italian so I could enjoy your web site. By the way, my Mother and her family came to the USA from Trieste, Italy. I am lucky to also have some Italian heritage.

Thoughts of death can produce different feelings depending on one’s own state of mind. Uneasyness, prejudice and violence are only some of those feeling. If one thinks and accepts the idea that life is just a journey, and like all journeys must have an end, there’s no problem. Different is when you think that you can change the world with your actions, and make it a different place. After 77 years of living I have come to think that we never do much enough to change the world, until we realize that the world has changed us ..

I own many books. Three, four thousands perhaps, even more, I don’t know. But this is not an important point. Few belonged to my father, others to my brother, some to my son, many to my wife, a large family library in any case. Three generations’ readings. Different books, different times, different interests. My father was a post Gutenberg printer, he was used to think that books were just tools to read the world. He used to say that even over two thousand years ago Qohelet said that there were too many books. Today I have about two hundred ebooks in my cloud waiting to be read besides the thousands in paper on the bookshelves. And you talk of ownership? I wonder what it does this mean …

“M’illumino/d’immenso” is my favourite sentence. It’s not a sentence, really, it’s a hermetic poem by the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. Perhaps the shortest poem ever written. To Italians, it’s perhaps the most famous poem of modern times: a tiny piece just seven syllables long. The title is “Mattino” (Morning), and you don’t need to know Italian to catch the beauty of its sound:

M’illumino
d’immenso

A rough translation would be “I flood myself with the light of the immense”, though the vagueness of that is alien to the poem’s terse musicality. The open vowels and the repeated ms and ns create a mood of wonder, evoking the light of a new day starting to flood the sky. The two lines capture something deep in consciousness that responds to this great but commonplace event out there in the external world.

Does giving away your possessions entail giving away yourself?

I often think of all the things, call them possessions or stuff, which have made up my life: where will all those things go, who will take care of them, why were they all so important to me? The answers are easy and painful: they’ll dissolve themselves, nobody will take care of them, they weren’t important, since I wasn’t importtant either … They are just memories of the past. The Italian poet Vincenzo Cardarelli, in this short poem on “memories”, says it well:

“Past”

Our memories, these exceedingly long shadows
of our brief body,
this tail of death
that we leave behind as we live,
the dreadful and lasting memories,
here they appear already:
melancholic and mute
ghosts agitated by a funereal wind.
And by now you are nothing more than a memory.
Your are well past and gone in my memory.
Yes, now I can say that
you belong to me
and something between us had happened
irrevocably.
All ended, taken away!
Precipitous and gentle
our time caught up with us.
Made of fleeting moments, it has woven
a circled and sad story.
We ought to have known that love
burns life and gives time flying wings.

Things, stuff, possessions, just like persons and people, disappear on “flying wings” … It’s not a question of being pessimistic, I call this reality, friends! …

Is there any possibility of life before birth? Is there any correlation to life after death?

The key words in these questions are “birth” and “death”. I believe only poets are able to give answers to these questions. Poetry and true poets are born to give man “un-reasonable” answers in form of poems. The English poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) in his poem “Prayer Before Birth” tried a plea from an unborn child to a divine power. He foresees for him death after birth. The poem suggests all the horrors that the world may inflict on him, in contrast with the wonders of nature. He will be powerless to stop himself from being used in some way for evil, for which he asks forgiveness. He prays for strength not to be made into a part of a machine, which clearly represents an army and war. If this happens, he would rather die.The poem highlights the horrors of war by juxtaposing them with the innocence of an unborn child. Although every soldier began in this way, it is somehow much more horrific to imagine them in the context of a baby.

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

Some centuries earlier, another English poet, John Donne (1572-1631) answered the second question with another poem, “Death Be Not Proud” that is among the most beloved poems in English literature. Its popularity lies in its message of hope couched in eloquent, quotable language. Donne’s theme tells the reader that death has no right to be proud, since human beings do not die but live eternally after “one short sleep.”

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

We may assume that “birth” and “death” are both just an “accident” we call “life”. I’m afraid Science can’t fully explain the meaning of life and death. Yet …

How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read?

How reading on screens differs from reading on paper is relevant to just about everyone who reads, to anyone who day by day switches between working long hours in front of a computer at the office and leisurely reading paper magazines and books at home; to people who have embraced e-readers for their convenience and portability, but admit that for some reason they still prefer reading on paper. As digital texts and technologies become more prevalent, we gain new and more mobile ways of reading, but are we still reading as attentively and thoroughly? How do our brains respond differently to onscreen text than to words on paper? Should we be worried about dividing our attention between pixels and ink or is the validity of such concerns paper-thin? One last question: how much does the new technology we use make us change the view of the world?