DOING NOTHING CAN BE DECEPTIVE !
DOING NOTHING or nurturing an overwhelming dislike to all kinds of profitable labour, as Washington Irving wrote of his indolent hero Rip Van Winkle – can be deceptive.....
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the last prince of an ancient Sicilian line, appeared to do nothing for most of his life, an impression supported by his reserve and profound melancholy. But he was one of the most knowledgeable scholars of European literature, which he read in five or six languages, and in the last three years of his life he wrote one of the great works of the 20th century, The Leopard.
Lampedusa's biographer, David Gilmour, describes how no one who was attending a literary festival in northern Italy in his last years, had the slightest hint that this rather sluggish, taciturn man was working on a novel that would put them all in the shade by "the sensibility and experience distilled in his writing" and the rendering of "the central problems of the human experience." His life's work over, Lampedusa expired before he saw the book published to huge acclaim.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the last prince of an ancient Sicilian line, appeared to do nothing for most of his life, an impression supported by his reserve and profound melancholy. But he was one of the most knowledgeable scholars of European literature, which he read in five or six languages, and in the last three years of his life he wrote one of the great works of the 20th century, The Leopard.
Lampedusa's biographer, David Gilmour, describes how no one who was attending a literary festival in northern Italy in his last years, had the slightest hint that this rather sluggish, taciturn man was working on a novel that would put them all in the shade by "the sensibility and experience distilled in his writing" and the rendering of "the central problems of the human experience." His life's work over, Lampedusa expired before he saw the book published to huge acclaim.
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