The Failure - Giovanni Papini E-Book

Giovanni Papini

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 390

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The Failure is a provocative introspection into the human psyche, creative ambition, and the existential crisis of the modern intellectual. Giovanni Papini constructs a narrative centered on the fictional memoir of a man who, after years of aspiring to greatness in art, literature, and philosophy, concludes his life as a failure. Set against the cultural backdrop of early 20th-century Italy, the work explores the tension between lofty ideals and harsh realities, highlighting the disillusionment that often accompanies the pursuit of genius. Through the protagonist's confessional voice, Papini examines themes such as identity, self-deception, pride, and the unrelenting desire for recognition. The novel serves as both a psychological study and a biting critique of the literary and artistic establishment. Papini dismantles the myth of the triumphant artist, replacing it with a portrait of vulnerability, missed opportunities, and bitter self-awareness. Since its publication, The Failure has intrigued readers for its raw honesty and philosophical depth. Its meditation on success, mediocrity, and the limits of human potential resonates beyond its historical context, offering a timeless reflection on the cost of personal aspiration. By challenging the romanticized notion of the heroic creator, Papini's work invites a deeper understanding of the emotional and intellectual toll of striving for greatness in an indifferent world.

Leseprobe

Giovanni Papini

THE FAILURE

Contents

INTRODUCTION

THE FAILURE

Chapter 1: A Torn Photograph

Chapter 2: A Hundred Books

Chapter 3: A Million Books

Chapter 4: From Everything to Nothings

Chapter 5: The Triumphal Arch

Chapter 6: Poverty

Chapter 7: My Tuscany

Chapter 8: I Discover Evil

Chapter 9: Others

Chapter 10: He!

Chapter 11: I Discover Unity

Chapter 12: I Am the World

Chapter 13: Nothing Is True—Tout Est Permit

Chapter 14: Fever Heat

Chapter 15: I Make a Speech at Night

'Chapter 16: Palazzo Davanzati

Chapter 17: Vol I, No. 1

Chapter 18: Flight from Reality —

Chapter 19: My Dead Brothers

Chapter 20: Small Remainders

Chapter 21: And Not a Word of Love?

Chapter 22: My Mission

Chapter 23: Perfect! ^ .

Chapter 24: A Man of Genius

Chapter 25: Dies Irae

Chapter 26: Action?

Chapter 27: Toward a New World

Chapter 28: The Approach to Divinity

Chapter 29: I Come Down from the Mountains

Chapter 30: I Have Only Myself to Blame

Chapter 31: Days of Shame

Chapter 32: What Do You Want of Me?

Chapter 33: Glory

Chapter 34: And Supposing

Chapter 35: Am I a Fool?

Chapter 36: And an Ignoramus

Chapter 37: I Do Not Know Men

Chapter 38; Inspiration

Chapter 39: My Debts

Chapter 40: The Clown

Chapter 41: Certainty

Chapter 42: Let Misfortune Come!

Chapter 43: The Disintegration of the Body

Chapter 44: Death

Chapter 45: But for That Very Reason

Chapter 46: The Return to Earth

Chapter 47: Who Am I?

Chapter 48: My Style

Chapter 49: Neither Down Nor Out

Chapter 50: To the New Generation

INTRODUCTION

Giovanni Papini

1881–1956

Giovanni Papini was an Italian writer, journalist, and philosopher, widely recognized for his provocative ideas and contributions to early 20th-century literature. Born in Florence, Papini was a central figure in Italian intellectual life and became known for his intense, polemical style and spiritual journey from skepticism to fervent Catholicism. His works often explore themes of faith, identity, and the struggle between modernity and tradition, earning him both acclaim and controversy.

Early Life and Education

Giovanni Papini was born into a modest Florentine family. A self-taught intellectual from a young age, Papini became deeply interested in philosophy, literature, and religion. He studied at the University of Florence, where he engaged with a wide range of philosophical currents, from positivism to pragmatism. His early atheism and rebellious spirit were reflected in his first writings, which sharply criticized religious and cultural institutions.

Career and Contributions

Papini quickly gained notoriety in the literary world through his essays and editorials in journals such as Leonardo and La Voce, where he challenged prevailing academic and religious thought. His early works, like Il Crepuscolo dei Filosofi (1906), questioned the relevance of major modern philosophers and sought to disrupt established intellectual norms.

One of his most significant and controversial books, The Devil (1911), blends fiction, theology, and philosophical speculation. In it, Papini presents a fictional autobiography of Satan, offering a bold, imaginative reinterpretation of evil, suffering, and divine justice. The work stands out for its philosophical depth and literary daring, capturing Papini’s capacity to merge metaphysical inquiry with narrative innovation.

Later in life, Papini underwent a radical spiritual transformation, converting to Catholicism in 1921. This marked a turning point in his career. His autobiography, Un Uomo Finito (A Man Finished), and his religious essays, such as Storia di Cristo (The Story of Christ, 1921), reflect his search for transcendence, personal redemption, and the reconciliation between reason and faith.

Impact and Legacy

Papini’s literary voice was singular—at once aggressive and introspective, polemical and lyrical. His works straddle the boundaries between literature, theology, and philosophy, anticipating many of the existential and spiritual crises that would define the 20th century. Though not as internationally celebrated as contemporaries like Kafka or Joyce, Papini was influential within Italian modernism and helped shape intellectual debates in pre- and post-Fascist Italy.

His controversial alignment with Fascism in the 1930s has sparked ongoing debates about the separation between a writer’s politics and their artistic legacy. Nevertheless, Papini remains a complex figure whose writing continues to provoke and fascinate readers and scholars alike.

Giovanni Papini died in 1956, after years of illness and partial blindness. Despite the fluctuations in his reputation over time, his work endures as a testament to a restless and searching mind. Today, Papini is remembered as one of the most idiosyncratic voices in Italian literature—a writer who relentlessly questioned the world, challenged orthodoxy, and sought meaning in the midst of chaos.

His legacy lies in his fearless pursuit of truth, however uncomfortable or paradoxical, and in his profound engagement with the spiritual and philosophical dilemmas of the modern age.

About the work

The Failure is a provocative introspection into the human psyche, creative ambition, and the existential crisis of the modern intellectual. Giovanni Papini constructs a narrative centered on the fictional memoir of a man who, after years of aspiring to greatness in art, literature, and philosophy, concludes his life as a failure. Set against the cultural backdrop of early 20th-century Italy, the work explores the tension between lofty ideals and harsh realities, highlighting the disillusionment that often accompanies the pursuit of genius.

Through the protagonist’s confessional voice, Papini examines themes such as identity, self-deception, pride, and the unrelenting desire for recognition. The novel serves as both a psychological study and a biting critique of the literary and artistic establishment. Papini dismantles the myth of the triumphant artist, replacing it with a portrait of vulnerability, missed opportunities, and bitter self-awareness.

Since its publication, The Failure has intrigued readers for its raw honesty and philosophical depth. Its meditation on success, mediocrity, and the limits of human potential resonates beyond its historical context, offering a timeless reflection on the cost of personal aspiration. By challenging the romanticized notion of the heroic creator, Papini’s work invites a deeper understanding of the emotional and intellectual toll of striving for greatness in an indifferent world.

THE FAILURE

Chapter 1: A Torn Photograph

I was never a child; I never had a childhood.

I cannot count among my memories warm, golden days of childish intoxication, long joyous hours of innocence, or the thrill of discovering the universe anew each day. I learned of such things later on in life from books. Now I guess at their presence in the children I see. I was more than twenty when I first experienced something similar in myself, in chance moments of abandonment, when I was at peace with the world. Childhood is love; childhood is gaiety; childhood knows no cares. But I always remember myself, in the years that have gone by, as lonely, sad, and thoughtful.

Ever since I was a little boy I have felt tremendously alone — and “peculiar.”

I don’t know why.

It may have been because my family was poor or because I was not born the way other children are born; I cannot tell. I remember only that when I was six or seven years old a young aunt of mine called me vecchio — “old man,” and the nickname was adopted by all my family. Most of the time I wore a long, frowning face. I talked very little, even with other children; compliments bored me; baby-talk

angered me. Instead of the noisy play of the companions of my boyhood I preferred the solitude of the most secluded corners of our dark, cramped, poverty-stricken home. I was, in short, what ladies in hats and fur coats call a “bashful” or a “stubborn” child; and what our women with bare heads and shawls, with more directness, call a rospo — a “toad.”

They were right.

I must have been, and I was, utterly unattractive to everybody. I remember, too, that I was well aware ' of the antipathy I aroused. It made me more “bashful,” more “stubborn,” more of a “toad” than ever,  I did not care to join in the games played by other • boys, but preferred to stand apart, watching them with jealous eyes, judging them, hating them. It wasn’t envy I felt at such times: it was contempt; it was scorn. My warfare with men had begun even then and even there. I avoided people, and they neglected me. I did not love them, and they hated ; me. At play in the parks some of the boys would chase me; others would laugh at me and call me ' names. At school they pulled my curls or told the teachers tales about me. Even on my grandfather’s j farm in the country peasant brats threw stones at me (without provocation, as if they felt instinctively that I belonged to some other breed. My relations, when they visited us, never called me to them, never petted me, except when the merest sense of decency seemed to demand it. I sensed the insincerity of such caresses and hid myself away in silence; when I was forced to answer their questions I was rude, discourteous, and impudent.

One memory is engraved on my heart more deeply than any other: chill, damp, Sunday evenings of November or December spent at my grandfather’s; a steaming bowl of punch in the middle of the table; a great bronze oil lamp hanging from the rafters; roasted chestnuts in a deep bowl passing from hand to hand; and all around the board the flushed faces of our numerous family — aunts, uncles, cousins, in greater numbers than I could count.

The patriarch, white and keen of wit, would sit by the fireside laughing and drinking. Under a light covering of ash the embers would crackle; the glasses would clink as they hit the plates; my aunts, bigoted, small-minded creatures, oozing with the scandal and the gossip of the week, would raise their voices in hideous chatter, as their offspring scrambled about the floor piercing the blue clouds of paternal smoke with shrieks and laughter. The noise of this stupid, miserly party made my soul and my head ache. I felt a stranger in that gathering — worlds apart from all of them. As soon as I could, unnoticed, I would slip out of the room, and feeling my way along a • damp wall, come to the long dark passage leading to the outer entrance. My poor, lonely, little heart would beat as if I were about to commit a crime. A glass door opened from the passageway upon a small uncovered court. Pushing it gently ajar, I would stand listening to the rain as it dripped from the roof upon the pavement or into the puddles under the eaves — a tired, listless, reluctant drip falling without enthusiasm, without decision, with that steady lifelessness, with that stupid galling obstinacy, of things that never end. I would listen to it there in the dark, the cool air fanning my face, my eyelids wet with raindrops; and if some capricious flurry splashed my cheek I was as happy as if it had come to purify me, to invite me out with it into the clean distances — far from houses, far from Sunday evening family parties. But soon a voice would call me back to light, to misery, to a chorus of reproaches: “Where did that boy get his manners?”

Yes, it is true, I never was a child. I was an “old man,” “a toad,” thoughtful and sullen.

Even from those early days the best of my life was within me. Cut off from joy and affection I withdrew into my inner self as a wild animal into its den, hiding myself away, stretching my cramped limbs, gaping with a bloodthirsty hunger which I satisfied with raw and eager dreams, in a lonely introspection into my empty soul, a fierce contemplation of the world as I saw it through that empty soul. Such was my only refuge, such my only joy. No one “liked” me. Hatred imprisoned me in solitude. Solitude made me sadder and more unlikeable; unhappiness stupefied my heart but stimulated my mind. I was “peculiar” — I was “different.” My “difference” separated me from those nearest me, and with the widening breach my “peculiarity” increased. At the very outset of life I began to taste, if not to understand, the sweetness, which only grown men for the most part feel, of that infinite and indefinable melancholy which spurns tears and groans and consolations, and which, content wtih its very lack of purpose, feeds on itself, little by little forming the habit of a selfish, secluded, wholly inward life, learning not to depend on others, separating itself forever from its fellowmen.

No, I have never known what it was to be young, nor can I recall having been a child. I was shy and pensive always, retiring and silent always, without a smile, without a single outburst of spontaneous joy.

I recognize myself in the pale and bewildered creature my first picture shows.

The photograph is small, dirty, faded, and torn through the middle just under the heart; the edges of the pasteboard mounting around it are black, like bands of mourning. The washed-out face of a dreamy child is turned toward the left — because in that direction, as you feel, there happens to be no one whose gaze he must endure. The eyes are sad and a little sunken (perhaps the photograph was not a good one!); the mouth is firmly closed, its lips pressed one upon the other as if to hide the teeth. One feature of beauty only: long soft curls that lie in a tangled mass on a sailor collar.

My mother says I was seven when this photograph was taken. Perhaps I was. I have no other proof of my childhood. But could you call this the picture of a child — the weazened, bleached, misshapen ghost, that does not look at me, that refuses to look at anybody?

It is not hard to see that these eyes were never intended to reflect the blue of the skies — they are gray and cloudy, by nature. These cheeks that are white and pale — they will always be white and pale. No blush will ever come to them (except from fatigue or from shame). And these lips, so tightly, so wilfully, closed were never made to be parted in a smile, nor were they made for speech, for prayer, for shouts of glee. They are the lips of a man who will suffer pain, but never betray it with a cry. They are lips that will be kissed too late in life.

In this bit of faded photograph I find the dead soul of those early days of mine; the sickly face of a “toad,” the frown of a “sullen,” a “stubborn” child, the self-possessed dejection of an “old man.” I feel a grip at my heart as I think of all those dreary days, of all those endless years, of that fettered, imprisoned life, of that purposeless useless anguish, of that insatiable homesick longing for other skies and other comrades.

No, no, this is not the picture of a child. I must insist again: I never had a childhood.

Chapter 2: A Hundred Books

A mad craving for knowledge rescued me from my solitude. Ever since I solved the mysteries of my speller, line by line, letter by letter — fat, squatty letters, lower-case, but in broad-faced type; impeccably moral illustrations in wood-cut; and winter evenings (how cold they were, how far away they seem!) as I sat under the big lamp, the lamp shade painted with blue flowers and yellow, beside my mother, still young, alone there save for me, her black hair shining in the lamp-light as she bent over her sewing — I have had no greater pleasure, no surer solace, than reading. My clearest and most cherished recollections of those years are not of my first blue velvet sailor cap; nor of oranges sucked dry at the edge of a stagnant garden pool; nor of stately tin war-horses vainly prancing on their strips of wood; nor yet of a first mysterious tingling felt in the presence of a little girl, panting, her lips half-opened, after a run at my side. Instead, I recall, with a still childish longing, my first or second reader, a poor, humble, wretchedly stupid book bound in light yellow pasteboard — on the cover a model boy, plump and pious, kneeling beside a narrow iron bed, and apparently saying the rhymed prayer I could spell out below. And my homesick yearning is even greater when I remember a kind of “Arabian Nights” of nature, a monstrous tome in a frayed green binding, its vast pages crumpled and rusty with dampness, many of them torn half in two or soiled with thumb marks and ink spots, which I always opened with the certainty of finding a marvel that was ever new though I had seen it many times before. There gigantic devil-fish with great, round, cruel eyes rose from the Pacific Ocean to catch big sailing vessels in their embrace; a tall youth knelt (his hat on, however) on the top of a mountain, casting a colossal shadow out against a murky German sky; between the steep towering cliffs of a Spanish mountain gorge rode a diminutive knight, his armor barely gilded with a ray of light from the sky so far above — frightened, he seemed, by the silence of that awful abyss; a sleepy Chinese god — with nothing on but a piece of cloth hanging from his waist, a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other — was putting the finishing touches on the World, chipping off the points of stiff, brittle stalagmites that rose in a jumbled forest from the earth about him; on the edge of a promontory, facing a white, stormy Polar Sea, stood a daring explorer, buried in his furs, unfurling a black wind-tattered flag to Arctic gales. Turning a reddened page or two, I would come upon fantastic skeletons of prehistoric monsters; dumb faces of Polynesian savages; coral islands floating like skiffs on a tropical sea; terrifying comets hurtling with long yellow tails across limitless ink-black skies that shrank in horror before them.

Among the first books to fall into my hands was a badly dilapidated copy of the memoirs of Garibaldi./ , I read and reread it, not understanding, yet instinctively stirred by all that smell of powder, all that flashing of sabers, all that spectacle of red-shirted outlaws riding to victory. I had not a trace of definite information in my head. I did not know what Italy was nor what a war was; but I had to give vent to my I excitement somehow, so I made a sketch of the General’s bearded face on the fly-leaf of the book; and that seemed to make him something alive and close to me.

One of the supreme moments of my life was when my father gave me full privileges over the family library, which was a round wicker basket — containing a hundred books or more — forgotten in a small storeroom in our rear attic, high up under the gables and overlooking the roofs of the houses around. That room became the veritable Alhambra of my dreams. All sorts of odds and ends had accumulated there —  fire-wood, cast-off rags, mouse-traps, bird cages, a National Guard musket and a red, moth-eaten Garibaldi shirt (on it a medal of the ’60 campaign).

Every day, the instant I was free, I locked myself up in that room, and, one by one, handling them with awe and almost fearful circumspection, drew the discarded books from their hiding place, poor dilapidated things, their covers gone, their backs broken, Volume H’s without Volume I’s, pages missing, or torn or crumpled, spotted with fly-specks or pigeon dung —  but so rich and glorious in surprises, wonders, and promises for me. I read here and there; I deciphered; I did not always understand; if I grew tired, I would begin afresh, so impatient was the ecstasy I felt at these my first approaches to the worlds of poetry, adventure, or history, which a word, a phrase, a picture, would evoke for a fleeting instant before my eyes.

I did not stop at reading: I dreamed; I meditated; I reconstructed; struggling to divine the meaning of it all. Those books were sacred things in my eyes. I believed every word they said. I was unable to distinguish between history and legend, between fact and fancy; printed letters stood for infallible truth to me.

My reality was not the life I knew at home, in school, on the streets, but the world of those books, 4 where 1 felt myself most alive. On scorching afternoons in summer I was with Garibaldi galloping across the pampas of Uruguay with herds of cattle, bullets ; showering around him, his cape blowing in the wind; j damp rainy mornings I spent with Count Alfieri coursing behind spans of horses and miles of verses along all the post-roads of Europe; my nights were nights of patriotic hatreds or of oratorical frenzies of glory, passed in company with the illustrious men whose acquaintance I made in Plutarch’s “Lives,” — dozens of tiny volumes, I remember, bound in blue paper and printed in very small type.

Moreover, those books gave me my first impulse to think. Down toward the bottom of that marvelous basket I found five or six large green volumes (a collection of aphorisms of Voltaire compiled by some infidel) in which God and Theology were overthrown and the Bible and the priests of the Church held up ’ to ridicule. Among the many other things in that first hundred books was a copy also of Carducci’s “Hymn to Satan”; and from the day I found that poem I have always felt a greater love for the Rebellious Angel under the earth than for the majestic Old Fogey who dwelt in the heavens. Later on I came to realize how crude and unsound all that anti-religious apologetic was; but to it I owe the fact, be it good or bad, that I am a man for whom God has never existed. Born of a father who was an atheist, baptized without \ his knowledge by my mother, brought up in ignorance ) of church and catechism, I have never had a so-called ( “crisis of the soul,” a “night of Jouffroy,” a “discovery t of the death of God.” For me God never died because He never lived in my heart.

There was another book which had a great influence on my mind at that time and consequently during later years: “The Praise of Folly,” by Erasmus of Rotterdam. We had an Italian translation of that book in the house, illustrated with the sharp and spirited woodcuts of Holbein. I read and reread it several times with indescribable delight. Perhaps to Erasmus I owe my passion for unusual thoughts and my profound conviction that when men are not fools they are scoundrels.

Chapter 3: A Million Books

After a few years of voracious and disordered reading I found that the limited number of books we had at home (plus those I borrowed from the scant collections of friends and relatives, plus second-hand volumes which I bought with the few pennies I would steal from my mother or save from my allowances for recess) were hopelessly insufficient. An older boy told me of rich and magnificent libraries in town which were open to everybody and where any book could be had for the asking — best of all, without spending a cent.

I decided to go there at once.

There was however one difficulty: to gain admission to those paradises you had to be at least sixteen years old. I was twelve or thirteen, but even too tall for my age. One July morning I made the experiment. Trembling, fearful, my heart beating violently, I came to a long stone stairway — how broad, how immense, how imposing it seemed! At the top I hesitated for two or three minutes, but finally mustered my courage and entered the application room. I filled out a slip the way I thought it ought to be, and handed it in, with the self-conscious and guilty air of a person who knows he is doing wrong. The clerk — I can see him still, curses on him! — was a little man with a big belly, a pair of squinting watery blue eyes (like the eyes of a dead fish), and deep shrewd wrinkles on either side of his mouth. He looked me over with an air of compassion and, in an irritating drawling voice, inquired:

“Just a moment — how old are you?”

My face flushed with rage rather than with shame, and I answered, adding three extra years to my twelve:

“Fifteen.”

“Not old enough. Sorry! Read the rules! Come back in a year.”

I went out angry, humiliated, crushed, aflame with a child’s hatred of that detestable man who was barring me, a poor boy starving for knowledge, from the use of — a million books, and who, taking cowardly advantage of a mere number printed on a piece of paper, was basely robbing me of a year of light and joy. On entering I had caught a glimpse of a vast hall with lines of venerable, high-backed chairs covered with green cloth, and all around the walls, books, books, books, old books, massive, heavy, bound in leather and parchment, lettered and ironed in gold —  a dream! Locked in every one of those books was the thing I wanted, the food for which I was starving: tales of emperors, poems of battles, lives of men who were more like gods, the sacred books of dead peoples, the sciences of all things, the verses of all poets, the systems of all philosophers. The thousand promises contained in those golden letters were for me! At my command those dust-covered volumes waiting there on their shelves behind the closely woven wire of the screening would have come down to me and I could have read them, studied them, devoured them, chapter by chapter, page by page, at my leisure!

I did not wait for another year to pass before trying a second time. Again I failed. Nor was I successful until the next summer. I was then just past thirteen —  perhaps thirteen and a half.

With the assistance of an older boy, who for some time had had free access to the library, I was at last able to get in. Fearing that I might attract attention or be taken for a child trying to fritter an idle hour away, I asked for a very serious book — a scientific book — Canestrini on Darwin.

This time another clerk was sitting behind the wood and glass partition — a tall, thin, ungainly fellow, looking more like a plucked chicken than like a man, and so nervous that he could neither stand still nor sit still. Without looking at me he took my slip, marked it with a blue pencil and handed it silently to a fattish sort of boy standing at his side.

I waited for half an hour, holding my breath for fear the book might not be in the library or that they might decide not to bring it to me. When at last it came I clutched it under my arm, and stole bashfully, on tip-toe, into the great reading-room. Never had I been filled with such awe, not even as a child in church. As though appalled at my own daring and frightened at finding myself, after so much plotting, in that immense reliquary of the wisdom of the ages, I sat down in the first unoccupied chair I came to. Confusion, pleasure, stupor, the feeling that all of a sudden I was e somehow older and more of a man, filled me with such bewilderment that for almost an hour I could not understand a word of the book that lay in front of me.

An atmosphere of majesty and holiness pervaded the great hall — like the sanctuary of a nation it seemed to me. Those chairs, with their dirty, greasy, faded upholstery — the green ending in yellow in some places or disappearing under black spots and stains in others  — became in my eyes so many majestic thrones. The silence weighed on my soul more solemnly and impressively than the deep peace of a cathedral.

From then on I went back every day, snatching every hour my tedious school work left free to me. Little by little I became accustomed to that silence, to that great room which soared above my shock of tangled uncombed hair, to that boundless wealth of volumes, old and new, of newspapers, reviews, pamphlets, atlases, manuscripts. Soon I felt quite at home. I came to distinguish between the different employees, to know the meanings of the mysterious numbers on the books and in the catalogues, to recognize the faces of various faithful and devoted bookworms who came there to read, as I did, every day — punctual and impatient as to a rendezvous with a beautiful girl.

I threw myself into all the readings suggested to me whether by my bubbling curiosity or by the titles of books which I found in other books seen in shop windows or on the push-carts of street venders. And so, without experience, without plan, guidance, or direction, but with all the ardor and fury of passion, I began the hard, the glorious life of one who would know everything.

Chapter 4: From Everything to Nothings

What did I want to learn? What did I want to do? I did not know. I had no programs, no advisers, not even a definite purpose. What matter whether I started here or there, turned East or West, went toward the depths or toward the heights? All I wanted was to know, know, know — know everything. (Everything! the watchword of my perpetual undoing!) Even at that age, I was one of those men who have no use for a little or for a half. Everything or nothing! And I have always wanted everything — an everything which neglects and excludes nothing. Completeness and totality, leaving nothing to be desired thereafter! Finis; in other words, immutability, death!

Eager to know everything and not knowing where to begin, I flew from subject to subject with the aid of manuals, text-books, dictionaries, encyclopedias.

The encyclopedia was the height of my ambitions and dreams; I thought it the greatest of all books; for, taking appearances and claims at their face value, it contained — yes, just so! — everything: the names of all men, all cities, all animals, all plants, all rivers, all mountains, each in its proper place, explained and illustrated. The encyclopedia answered every question offhand, without putting you to any trouble of research. My lively imagination pictured all other books as rivers pouring their contents into that boundless ocean of knowledge; as bunches of grapes destined to fill that great vat of wine with their blood-red juice; as uncountable grains of wheat, which, ground and kneaded, became bread to fill all hungry mouths and satisfy all appetites.

As the mystic loses himself in the thought of the one universal God and seeks to forget all particulars of sense, so I plunged headlong into that sea of knowledge which no sooner flooded my soul than it sent a new desire, a new thirst, upon me.

Through the continued use and handling of encyclopedias I was finally possessed with the idea of compiling one myself. At fifteen, with a mind lusting incontinently for knowledge, the undertaking seemed an easy one. However, my encyclopedia was not to be like others. After a considerable amount of study I came to the conclusion that no complete and perfect encyclopedia was as yet in existence. Some, I found, contained things which others lacked: in spots they said very little, in others much more; and to my eventual astonishment and great chagrin I discovered that in many cases — cases of rare names and information of detail — they were silent, not to say ignorant, entirely.

So I proposed to compile an encyclopedia which would not only contain the materials of all the encyclopedias of all the countries and in all the languages of the world, but go far beyond them all, gathering together in one place information now scattered through many works — not a mere copying and rehashing of old encyclopedias, but a new one based on dictionaries, manuals, and the most up-to-date and specialized treatises on science, literatures, histories.

This decision reached, I did not sit with my hands folded. My life at last had found a purpose. My long hours in the library had now a worthy and a definite objective in view. I set to work with fiery impatience. From that day on — it was July, and my vacation time at school — every word beginning with the letter “a” had for me the fascination of a friendly face. All those solid and compact encyclopedias, lined against the walls, all the big dictionaries, all the much-handled and thumb-worn indices, special lexicons, and thesauri, were taken down from their shelves and brought to my seat in the great hall that I might copy, rewrite, translate, devour them, with an avidity and eagerness even more intense.

Oh, what a nuisance those slimy German rivers beginning with “Aa” — they gave me no end of trouble! What a long list of titles had to be copied before I finished with a family of learned Dutchmen named van der Aa — ! How endless and how tedious the enumeration of Latin abbreviations commencing with the letter A! But what a flood of tenderness came over me when I reached the far distant city of Abila that lay by the sea. I met books of law, for the first time, in compiling a self-satisfied treatise on a big word I was delighted to learn: abigeato — “cattle stealing.” I read the Old Testament in search of Abigail, the pious, and of Abraham, the patriarch; I delved into the commentators of Dante to unearth the life and crimes of Bocca degli Abati, the incendiary. I became an authority on the history of Abbiategrasso and on the geography of Abyssinia.

I began by copying confusedly into note-books or on odd scraps of paper, later rewriting everything neatly on clean sheets, ruled and margined, which I bound with string. In the daytime at the library I just scribbled and scribbled — anything would do: my most hasty and ill-formed letters, with ink spots, abbreviations, cancelations, scrawls; but in the evening, at home, under the trembling light of a candle in my bedroom, my most careful and elegant ^English round” — ink red and black, and a blotter under my left arm! What fun it was! No game, no ticket to the theater, could have attracted me away from that dim light where I sat hunched up over my encyclopedia; it is safe to wager that even the chance to see some wild animals in their cages at the fair — an excitement I loved above all else — would have had no effect on me at such moments.

But this undertaking — which so greatly magnified me, poor ignorant child that I was, in my own eyes, and even in the eyes of the library attendants who looked at me with a certain pity intermingled with irony and respect — began to lose interest for me, or rather actually to frighten me, because of the standard of absolute perfection which I had set myself. I had been at work at least two months, passing my days under the sizzling skylights of one library, and my evenings under the arc-lights of another, or near the candle in my own room; and yet, writing as hard as I could, I had not succeeded in getting beyond the ‘words beginning with “Ad.” A long article on the wrathful Achilles bored me; I was skirting the Homeric question — standing on the brink of classical philology: several Greek words (I did not know Greek) baffled and humiliated me. *

Reason came to the aid of my fatigue. I was just beginning at that time to dip into philosophy (in who can tell what perfidious books!), beginning after a fashion to think in a more systematic way, thinking much less crudely even than might have been expected of one of my age. Thus I came to realize that true knowledge did not consist, could not consist, in an alphabetical series of facts pillaged here and there and in all directions, nor of a room full of note-books and scraps of paper, mechanically set in order but lacking any breath of life and any thinking soul.

I renounced the idea of the encyclopedia; yet, on the other hand, I determined not to fall into the trap of specialization. My brain, a true Don Juan of learning, refused to concentrate on any one love. Nothing could satisfy me but the limitless, the magnificent, the total of all things, the fullness of the ages, the endless procession of the centuries — and of books.

It occurred to me that history might be just the thing for me.

I thought of history, naturally, on gigantic lines —  history of everything, of all human activities (except, perhaps, the sciences, which I could take up later for amusement). I never dreamed, of course, of a short history of any one epoch or any one people; it was to be a world history covering all ages and all races. To be sure, this new decision reduced my original plan by half; but what was left was quite big enough for a writer fifteen or sixteen at the most.

So once again I set out on my way, studying, copying, compiling.

I already knew Cantu’s universal history and admired it; for it had come to my aid on many occasions of intellectual embarrassment. But my plan was to write a book that should be more sound, more comprehensive, more accurate. Besides, Cantu was a Catholic and a reactionary. My history would be rationalistic and revolutionary, since at that time I was, like my father, an atheist and a republican.

The idea I had was the antiquated medieval notion of holding up a mirror to all things — but with more understanding and spiritual insight than the historians of old. Facts, facts, facts, all the facts there were, but linked one to another by a growing, an ascending, an evolving life, organized, unified, fixed by human thought, a thought ranging all the way from the blind instinct of self-preservation to the consciousness of the heroic futility of thought for thought’s sake!

To begin with I plunged into the morass of Egyptian chronology and came out with an outline of the history of Egypt down to the time of the Alexandrians. I was about to pass on to the Chinese when I suddenly realized that my history was without a beginning! A complete history of the universe must start with the Creation, not with the first written records merely. My limited knowledge of astronomy and geology had already given me a notion of marvelous antiquities, of perpetual disintegrations and rebirths of worlds. Unlike Cantu, I could not accept, word for word, the Seven Days’ Creation of the Hebrews, the “let there be light,” and the earthly paradise of “Genesis.” The story of the world’s inception had to be told, not according to Moses, but according to S-c-i-e-n-c-e! At that time Camille Flammarion and Charles Darwin represented science to me. The former led me back to Laplace, the latter to Lyell. And so there I was, suddenly turned astronomer, geologist, and anthropologist, serving up the world’s formation to modern taste. On many a night I strained my poor eyes —  already near-sighted — trying to pierce the depths of the sky in search of one of those white nebulae — vast whirlpools of stars and planets — about which the new cosmologists were spinning such marvelous yarns.

When I had written — with a certain poetic license —  the flaming epic of the solar system (and the slower moving history of the cooling of the earth’s crust), I suddenly reflected that I still had not done everything. I had given an account of the actual facts of the world’s creation, but said nothing of what men have dreamed and believed about the beginnings of things — and a history must omit nothing.

So I turned from science to cosmogony; and this conscientiousness of mine as a fifteen-year-old historian  — not just facts but views and opinions about the facts  — had a great effect on my studies. My curiosity branched in two directions. On the one hand I came to comparative literature, on the other to religion. To religion especially! There was no theogony, no cosmic myth, that I did not investigate, summarize and copy, to swell the beginnings of my history.

No religion interested me so much, however, as that of the ancient Hebrews. We had an old Bible at home  — one of those black covered editions which English Protestants were offering here in Italy thirty odd years ago, at half a lira (and no takers!); and in it I reread all of “Genesis.” The story did not satisfy me. At the library I got out the best known critiques on the Seven Days’ Creation, apologies of Catholic “concordists,” and heretics on the other side. I made my way through the long-winded notes and glosses of the polyglot Bibles. I skimmed, or read, witty and wicked pamphlets of the eighteenth century and seminary exegeses sauced in modern style to meet demands of candidates for the clergy who were not wholly dunces. I gloated over essays by Frenchmen, as clear and sparkling as champagne, and over monographs by German philosophers and “higher critics” as solid, as meaty, and as heavy as loaves of unleavened bread. And still I was unable to distinguish the truth from the sophism, the proved fact from the hypothesis. I also took another peep into the green volumes in the basket-library; and little by little I forgot the original object of my research, to lose my way in the labyrinth, the tanglewood, the Slough of Despond, of Biblical interpretation.

I took quite a fancy to the concordistic theory and had the patience to wade through the mountainous volume of a certain Pianciani, and after that the huge Hexameron of Stoppani, going on to other biological and scholastic disquisitions by various Jesuits bitten by the Darwinian bug. I remember that one observation occurred to me: all known commentaries on the Bible were made by priests, bishops, theologians, believers, bigots, whether Lutherans, Quakers, Waldensians, or Socinians. Lacking, however — so I believed, that is —  was a commentary on the Bible made by a rationalist, by a man capable of viewing facts dispassionately, by a disinterested unbeliever, by a free unbiased spirit, one who would go through the Old and the New Testaments verse by verse and courageously bring to the bald light of day the errors, contradictions, lies, absurdities, proofs of cruelty, deception, rascality, stupidity, with which those pages said to be inspired by God are crammed. Such a commentary would, I thought, do more to undermine faith than all those atheistic philippics, all those dull pedantic controversies which comprise the greater part of modern antitheology.

“This commentary does not exist,” said I. “I will write it!”

By this time gigantic undertakings were failing to give me even a thrill; in comparison with the encyclopedia of encyclopedias this new book was a trifle which I could toss off, so I thought, with the greatest ease —  in a couple of years, at the most. I set to work in earnest.

My first step was to get a Hebrew grammar; and in a few days I was writing large distorted letters of the Hebrew alphabet with some speed and copying verses of the Pentateuch from the original. Soon I had what seemed to me a huge pile of notes; and every morning and every afternoon the pile grew higher, till one day I thought I had enough. All this disheveled and unkempt erudition was getting on my nerves. I realized that I must be working it into some sort of shape at once, or I would be dropping it for good and all.

So I wrote out the first verse of “Genesis” in Hebrew and began to set forth my commentary: “On the first day God created the heaven and the earth.” But I immediately found myself floundering around in the midst of the biggest difficulties. This single verse contains two words which have always given the commentators much to stew about: — the Christians, in particular, translating them in their own manner to fit the theology laid down in the councils and by the fathers of the church. Does the text say “God” or “the gods,” “created” or “formed”?

That is to say, were the first Jews monotheists or polytheists? Did they believe in a creation out of nothing, or did they think of God as a sort of sculptor who merely gave form to an unshapen substance not created by Him and independent of Him? Knotty problems, I need not say, problems involving history, * philology, philosophy! But I was not dismayed. I began to write.

I wrote, and wrote, and wrote; but still I could not get free of the mess; arguments pro, arguments con, assertions, denials, affirmations, rebuttals, piled up; quotations in three or four languages followed each other; philosophical and theological parentheses were opened, expanded, but rarely closed! My poor smattering of Hebrew was of little avail in this terrible crisis; I was forced to fall back upon the knowledge of others; and the only dependable authorities, in my Judgment, were those who always put the priests in the wrong and gave the verdict to Reason!

I was inclined to believe that the correct translation was “the gods formed”; but how convince others of that — convince them in such a way that they could not answer back? So again I wrote, and wrote, and wrote; but I never could get beyond that infernal verse of “Genesis” which will stick in my memory to my dying day. The more I wrote the more jumbled my ideas became. My brain was a whirl of glosses, etymologies, inductions, reservations, witticisms, which rioted together in a wild dance of hobgoblins to which I could find no rhyme nor reason. At last, at last, I got to the end. I had covered more than two hundred pages in a closely written hand. I was ready for the second verse: “And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Here the pitfalls were not so numerous and the theologians fewer, but I still had many difficulties to cope with. I had to explain all that darkness and all that deep and to distinguish between the “spirit of God” and the “idea of God” (the basis of the Alexandrian trinity, this latter). The reference to “waters” brought me to early thinkers of Greece: to Hesiod and his theogony with the world rising out of the ocean; and to Thales, the sage of Miletus, who saw in water the first principle of all things. I was now splashing up to my neck in learning, even venturing a quotation now and then in Greek (what a thrill as I first set my trembling uncertain hand to copying letter by letter words in the divine characters of Plato!). I wandered about in that wilderness of annotations, criticisms, elucidations, dissertations much as Adam must have done in his own private zoo and botanical garden at Eden.

By dint of fast writing I came to the third verse: “And God said: let there be light. And there was light” — words that astounded even Longinus, the rhetorician, pagan that he was, when he came to them. But I was fresh from Bayle, Voltaire, and the author of the Veglie Filosofiche Semiserie; I felt no respect for them whatever! Rather it was amusement. What a joke on old Jehovah who was trying to palm His light off on us, forgetting that He hadn’t yet made the Sun!

I never got as far as the fourth verse — I was already tired and bored. If three verses — properly done — took so much explaining, what would I need for the thou. sands and thousands and thousands of verses in the whole Bible? It was better to go back to the old method of summing up and then attacking. I worked out a plan for a great polemic against faith in general and even went so far as to write several fragments of it out. It was, I remember, in a racy Tuscan style, with a tone of bantering, somewhat in the vein of Guerrazzi’s “Ass,” which I was reading at that time with inexpressible relish.