By Antonio La Cava
It is a gloomy night of November. The London centre, with its buzz of voices and noises, its crowd that challenges the first cold and the annoying rain of the late autumn, does not give you the slightest space to the day’s considerations. It is one of those nights less favourable to stop and reflect, so much as for thinking about the Afterlife.
When the guest arrived, a small group of people had already gathered in the hall of the Italian bookshop. The chattering of the people fills the moments before David Morante starts his lectio about the Afterlife. And the people flocked, of course, are mostly Italian.
Almost everybody talks about something: a woman chats about her son, doctor, professor, researcher in the United States, she talks at length in praises, proud, solicitous in the details to exhaustion; a young woman talks about the last book she has read, a man about his last trip. Someone else is silent, conscious that if one starts talking about death and the Afterlife, it will be better, maybe, to be silent.
The lectio starts. David Morante (Italian Consul in London) brings an alarm clock. “It will beat the time” or maybe it will be useful to wake us up from our trifling thoughts, growing numb by the dumbness of everyday’s life, to think for a while about those elusive meanings of the opposite of life.
“The Afterlife has been portrayed in mythology, in science fiction and in horror. And if once – Morante explains – mythology and the topic of the Afterlife were interrelated, centuries by centuries it developed into a real eschatology”.
“The first author to describe the realm of the Hereafter was Homer. And his trip through the Afterlife reveals a pessimistic conception about the Afterlife and the regret for the lived life”. Christianity shakes the idea of the Hereafter, and through Dante’s beyond-this-word e journey it is possible to explore an unknown world. Morante highlights “the real humanization in Dante’s journey” and its transgression.
It is a Pindaric flight from a century to another, from a poet to another. The Consul’s voice, without a break, takes us in an woeful vision of an unreal Afterlife, portrayed by the poets of the Romanticism like Foscolo and Leopardi.
“There is a time in which atheism becomes poetry, the Other World corresponds to the Nothing. And where a grave is just a stone”. This concept is rendered more dramatically by Leopardi, according to whom after youth there is nothing.
“In the Russian generation it will be Blok to portray death with a negative and pessimistic vision”. Blok, respected as the major Russian poet after Puškin, never accepted the passage to communism, and that impossibility to adapt to the modern times led him to live “with death in his heart”.
But there is time, too, for a more ironic vision about the Other World through the quotation of Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. It is a collection of poems, like epitaphs, that tells the life of each person buried in a cemetery of a small village in the American countryside. The peculiarity is that the characters (being dead) describe their lives in the sincerest truth, thus describing their most intimate matters.
In the twentieth century death becomes an obsession. “Sometimes death is a poet’s fellow for all is life”. It will be Cesare Pavese to embody a vision of the death like a tormenting and constant idea in his poetics. “Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi, – Pavese writes – questa morte che ci accompagna dal mattino alla sera, insonne, sorda, come un vecchio rimorso o un vizio assurdo. I tuoi occhi saranno una vana parola, un grido taciuto, un silenzio”. Pavese wrote these words thus expressing his existential uneasiness that led him to suicide on the 27th August 1950, in a hotel room, in Turin. He was found dead, laid in bed, after swallowing sixteen sleeping pills bags.
“If amongst all the stories which deal with the Afterlife I had to save one – Morante says – it would be the story about Paolo and Francesca, described by Dante in the fifth canto of the Inferno”. In the tale of Paolo and Francesca “love wins death” and though “l’amor condusse noi ad una morte caina” (Paolo talks to Dante), such love “ancor non m’abbandona”.
The Consul gave the last glance to his alarm clock. Time is over. And that coursed alarm clock, which has beaten the time of our journey through the poetry of the Afterlife, it reminds us that we are closer and closer to that ineluctability to us more and more undefined.
Copyright 2008 GIORGIOSTUDIO Ltd – All rights reserved
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