The Wisdom of Mr Palomar

Swallow Dance (1878) by Utagawa Hiroshige and Utagawa Hiroshige III [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

Mr Palomar by Italo Calvino

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Harold Bloom mentions in How to Read and Why (pp.64-66) why Italo Calvino was one of the greatest short story writers and refers specifically to Calvino's "wisdom" (p. 64). Calvino's wisdom is not wanting in this collection of short stories centred on the life of Mr Palomar. 

Each section of the book focuses on a particular activity of Mr Palomar's in various locations, with each story within the theme based around a particular sub-theme. I have often read of literary "constellations" (p. 107), where literature in sum forms "an imaginary outline or meaningful pattern" not in the sky, but in the mind. 

At first, Mr Palomar appears to be suffering from some kind of introverted social awkwardness. Yet as the stories progress, Calvino's wisdom shines through as I began to identify with Palomar and to see his own wisdom beyond his apparent social ineptitude. What I discovered was that Mr Palomar was self-aware, to the point where he is conscious of his failings yet continues to deceive himself. Yet (p. 107):

The universe can perhaps go tranquilly about its business; he surely cannot. The road left open to him is this: he will devote himself from now on to the knowing of himself, he will explore his own inner geography, he will draw the diagram of the moods of his spirit, he will derive from it formulas and theories, he will train his telescope on the orbits of the course of his life rather than those of the constellations.

Here is where I made the connection with Bloom. Bloom often writes of characters "overhearing" themselves, but Calvino makes Mr Palomar "overlook" himself, finding:

We can know nothing about what is outside us, if we overlook ourselves... the universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.

This link between the individual and environment echoes James Allen's "environment is but his looking glass" (Calvino writes "The universe as mirror") when writing of the interaction between inner and outer life (but with a sense of manifestation of inward conditions on the outside). Palomar laments that he is not like this (104):

To the man who is friend of the universe, the universe is a friend.

Recently, I have been learning more about induction versus deduction in terms of my academic work. Here, Calvino outlines how Mr Palomar is a deductivist (p. 98), rather than an inductivist, and how Palomar likes to construct models of principles and experience, and to force things into the model when experience fails to live up to his model.

Yet for all Mr Palomar's attempts to remain aloof, his models never fit, and when he looks away from the rational geometric designs of his models, he sees human suffering, much like a person who tries to deny their emotions until the pot boils over and the emotions spill out. I came to see much of myself, and dare I say much of all of us, in Mr Palomar. 

The stories seem to grow like a human, from childhood to adolescence, to age and wisdom. My fondness for Mr Palomar grew as his journey progressed. There is much material for introspection in this work, and I found that my selfish desire to introspect through, rather than with, Mr Palomar, was forgiven by Calvino at the conclusion. 

A remarkable work with a tenor that does not, to the best of my knowledge, exist anywhere in Anglophone writing.

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Road Pricing and Provision: Solving public policy challenges

Photo © Depositphotos.com/toxawww 

Today I delivered a presentation to the ACT Economic Society of Australia at the Griffin Centre in Canberra. The slides from my presentation are available below:

Road Pricing and Provision: Solving public policy challenges from University of Canberra

Walter Benjamin's Oeuvre: The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Sketches of Walter Benjamin. Credit: Renée [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0] via Flickr

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Walter Benjamin's work fascinates me, and his chapter "The Flâneur" in his unfinished tome, The Arcades Project, was the inspiration for my research philosophy (or how, as a political scientist, I can work while being disillusioned with contemporary politics). 

This collection consists of three essays translated by J.A. (Jim) Underwood: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death; and Picturing Proust. I have not read Proust's work, so the third essay felt a little like name-dropping, and I was the uneducated who had no idea who Benjamin was talking about. I am somewhat familiar with Kafka's work, so the essay was enlightening and provided an interesting background on Kafka. 

The first essay, which gives its name to the collection, I found to fit the theme of much of my experience with social media, and I was comfortable with the content. That is not to say that I didn't learn anything, however, as Benjamin's ideas would easily be revived today as "The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction". 

My immediate thought was to Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, one of the most over-rated tourist attractions, according to Techly's Joe Frost. I tend to agree. I was surprised how small it is. 

But here Benjamin comes to the rescue: Mona Lisa has an "aura". With the invention of film, the aura disappears. The camera becomes the audience. Stardom replaces the aura - fans are in awe of the film star, rather than being in awe of the event. 

Social media does something similar. It is more about creating an aura around the holiday for others, rather than enjoying the viewing in the moment. While I don't pretend to know anything much about Walter Benjamin's work just yet, I am already a fan. 

But as the camera hides all of the apparatus of film-making beyond the lens, unlike the theatre which forces us to ignore the reality that surrounds the stage, so too is social media. But in terms of marginalia, I found myself most out of my depth with the knowledge of Benjamin's endless name-dropping. Had I a clue who most of these people were (contemporary art, film, and literary critics, I presume), I would have a better understanding of the essays. 

One thing that I have learnt, especially in attempting to understand an author's oeuvre, is that a sound knowledge of the author's times and contemporaries is essential. Reading Hemingway, I discovered Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein, et al. Reading Calvino, I realise I have much to learn. 

Reading Plato, I am pleased that my reading of the Stoics, Heraclitus, Homer, Hesiod, and even Virgil have given me enough of this knowledge not to gloss over names as I might with non-English phrases, but to feel like I know something about what I am reading. Whether I am missing Mortimer Adler's point is another story, but I feel that if one wants to study another's oeuvre, one must study more than just the author's work. 

And that is what makes my latest ventures into Italo Calvino and Walter Benjamin so exciting. I am leaving my Anglophone shores far behind as I paddle off into the unknown. Where I land I do not know. 

But I do know I enjoy Walter Benjamin's work immensely. Whether I can bring myself to tackle The Arcades Project's 1,000-odd pages anytime soon remains to be seen.

And while I was hoping that my fascination with Benjamin made me somewhat original, I was saddened to learn that, once again, I am simply late to the trend!

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