The Lost Art of 16th-Century Italy for Living Smoothly, Calmly, and Openly to Wonder – The Marginalian

Language is a container of thoughts and feelings that shape content. The greatest danger is that we mistake the shape of the object, reducing concepts and experiences that we cannot express or contain in the words tasked with capturing the spill of the unspeakable. (This is what you do Dictionary of Ambiguous Grief in a miraculous way.) The more complex and associated this concept, the emotion, the experience, its name is more lacking and the more urgent is the desire to speak it in the language of the mind, to set it in sound and meaning in a metaphor.

Again and again, we have struggled to name that quality of being, that state of mind, that state of mind that we want to “live well” in ourselves. Edith Wharton called its rudiment “an unassailable silence.” Bertrand Russell called it “the greatness of imagination.” Iris Murdoch called it, simply and perfectly, “ignorance.”

In one of the wonderful essays in his posthumous collection Unforgivable (public library), Italian writer Cristina Campo (April 29, 1923–January 10, 1977) gives the 16th-century Italian name sprezzatura because of that ineffable quality of being where our deepest longings for emotion, wisdom, morality, and beauty tremble.

Noting the various meanings of the word, “all very beautiful and very imprecise” — among them “candor, eloquence, contrary to manners or love,” “the service of beauty,” and “the manner of speaking or acting in a common way… common to a self-confident king” — Campo considers the narrowing of the descriptive meaning:

Sprezzatura it is actually a complete moral attitude that, like the word itself, requires a context that is almost extinct in today's world, and, like the word itself, is in danger of disappearing. Or rather, since nothing real ever disappears, it is in danger of losing power to those oubliettes where, in cruel and true times, they used to arrest princes who had offended the people until their names were forgotten.

[…]

Sprezzatura it is the rhythm of morality, it is the music of inner grace; is tempoI would like to say, when the complete freedom of any given end is manifested, although it is always explained by a secret ascesis. Two lines hide it, like a ring in the case: “With a light heart, with light hands, / To take life, to leave life.”

We may find out sprezzaturaCampo notes, in the life of the Trappist monks, “in the brutal geometry after Dragonfly Dance,” “in the writings of Frédéric Chopin, where tenderness and turmoil, rubati and turbati, joy itself and piercing forebodings were mercilessly measured,” and in, of course, fairy tales.

Above all else, sprezzatura it is in fact a resistance to the violence and irrationality of others, an irrational acceptance – that to the blind eye may look like indifference – of the unchanging conditions that it “decides not to exist” in peace (and in doing so transforms it in an incomparable way). But be careful. Sprezzatura it is not kept alive or transmitted for a very long time if it is not established, like religious vows, in an almost complete separation of earthly possessions, a constant readiness to sacrifice oneself if one happens to have them, an indifference to apparent death, a deep respect for what is higher than oneself and inviolable, courage, whose symbols are indescribably precious here. Beauty (the inside before it's seen) above all, the generosity of spirit in your roots, and the joyful way of being in the world. This means, among other things, the ability to fly in the face of criticism with good grace and a smile and a dignified speech born of total self-forgetfulness … a great, unceasing invitation to inner freedom that is total self-forgetfulness – of pride drawn by the side mirrors of psychology and society – and stripping away the light steps that block the light. a rhythm that brings out the joy of the saints… “With a light heart, and light hands…” Pure life is given rhythm by this simple and powerful music, completely combined with oblivion and asking for help.

This “ineffable rhythm,” he writes, is found in “the beauty of a living flame,” “in the burst of starry silence,” where “supernatural beauty” is encountered, “where living and leaving are the same, the same joy.”

Couple that with Campo's fiction as a lens to the puzzle of knowing who you are and what you want, and revisit Marie Howe's poem “The Maples,” which offers its own spare, flamboyant answer to the perennial question of how we should live our lives.