Bellavista's Middle Way

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Eastside Road, January 7, 2013—•Luciano De Crescenzo: Thus Spake Bellavista: Naples, Love, and Liberty. Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni. New York: Grove Press, 1989.

WHY HAS IT TAKEN over twenty years for me to find out about this marvelous book? Oh well, quit complaining, Charles, and thank you, Giovanna; my eyes are now open.

De Crescenzo is well enough known in Italy, I'm sure; I'll have to look him up in a couple of weeks when I'm haunting Feltrinelli. I have the provisional feeling that he may have made a big splash with this book when it appeared in 1977 (as Così parlò Bellavista, a best seller in Italy); he followed it up with a number of sequels, and a film of the same title appeared in 1984. (Gotta look that up, too.)

The book's an interpenetration of two: one, a series of funny anecdotes of life in Naples — misunderstandings, thefts, arguments, jokes, and the like, many of them funny enough to have caused me to laugh out loud in the reading. To cite only one, the epigraph to the seventh chapter:

"Put that cigarette out!" shouted the bus conductor.
"But I've only just had coffee."
"Ah, that's different."A. SAVIGNANO

Two, a series of philosophical dialogues, Platonic style, in which the Socratic method, lubricated by bottles of decent rosso, explore a fascinating view of the good life, essentially based on Epicurus.

I don't think it's giving too much away to mention Bellavista's main argument, which doesn't appear until that seventh chapter, "The Theory of Love and Liberty": might there be some organizing principle that can guide us toward that good life based, as Epicurus taught, on the moderate pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain?

Bellavista, a patient and good-natured fellow who discusses these things with a group of intelligent but relatively ill-educated and intellectually unambitions buddies, has just such an outlook, which he atributes to "a friend of mine in Milan, Giancarlo Galli, who may or may not be the journalist, writer, and economist profiled in Italian Wikipedia — another type to look up at Feltrinelli.

Bellavista's theory rests on the two basic human desires: for Love and Liberty. The first

is the feeling that impels us to seek the companionship of our fellows, and the acts of love are all the things we do in the attempt to share our joys and griefs with others. This reaching out to our fellow men is instinctive.Thus Spake Bellavista, p. 41

Straightforward enough. Liberty is a more recalcitrant of definition, but Bellavista does pretty well:

For some people liberty means democracy, for others it means anarchy, so at this point I shall have to spend a couple of minutes explaining exactly what I mean by liberty… I would define liberty as the simultaneous desire not to be oppressed oneself and not to oppress others.ibid., p. 107

Since both Love and Liberty have their opposites, Bellavista then lays his idea out on a coordinate system, as I mentioned here the other day, whose abscissa is a line from Hate to Love and whose ordinate is one from Power to Liberty. This results in four quarters, which I can't help but link to R.H. Blyth's four classifications of literature: objective objective, objective subjective, subjective objective, and — you guessed it: the worst of the lot, "wailing like a saxophone": subjective subjective.

Bellavista populates these quadrants with a number of familiar characters, depending on where they fall in these quadrants. The type fully committed to Love and neutral on the subject of Liberty (and it should be noted these qualities are necessarily in constant irreconcilable tension) is the Saint; his opposite is the Devil. The type fully committed to Liberty, on the other hand, and neutral on Love, is the Hermit; his opposite is the King. A "bad" King, who is driven by Hate, is the Tyrant; a "good" one is the Pope. Their opposites are the Sage and the Rebel.

In general of course we prefer those in the upper right-hand quadrant. The Scientist is a little more concerned with Liberty than with Love, the Poet reverses that tendency; both flank the Sage as nearly ideal types. What Bellavista argues for, in his sweet practical way, is a middle way, precisely the Sage's way, avoiding the complications attending the desire for Power and giving in to the seductions of Love, because, as Epicurus teaches us, one must love others if one is to be loved, and one must give others their way if one is to be allowed one's own.

I read Thus Spake Bellavista hard on the heels of What's the Economy For, Anyway?, by John de Graaf and Steven Batker, discussed here the other day. They make a perfect pairing: De Crescenzo supplies the theoretical element, entertainingly and persuasively; Batker and de Graaf the history of engineered society's attempt to institute (or, lately, evade) political approaches to achieving that element.

I increasingly believe the besetting problems with American society — from violence to pettiness — are grounded in an increasingly present antisocialism among individuals. Different people will supply different theories as to the reasons for this: breakdown of the family, institutionalization of education, defeat of organized labor, fractionalization of religious cults, glorification of individualism: the list can go on forever.

In the rage to find sources of this antisocialism, in order to institute corrective action, so far only De Crescenzo, in my experience, has brought the matter down to comfortable daily-life observations. It doesn't hurt that he leavens the investigation with a good deal of humor. I wish I could spend an evening with these two books, President Obama, Robert Reich, and a bottle of good red wine.

Bellavista's Middle Way

To contact us Click HERE
Eastside Road, January 7, 2013—•Luciano De Crescenzo: Thus Spake Bellavista: Naples, Love, and Liberty. Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni. New York: Grove Press, 1989.

WHY HAS IT TAKEN over twenty years for me to find out about this marvelous book? Oh well, quit complaining, Charles, and thank you, Giovanna; my eyes are now open.

De Crescenzo is well enough known in Italy, I'm sure; I'll have to look him up in a couple of weeks when I'm haunting Feltrinelli. I have the provisional feeling that he may have made a big splash with this book when it appeared in 1977 (as Così parlò Bellavista, a best seller in Italy); he followed it up with a number of sequels, and a film of the same title appeared in 1984. (Gotta look that up, too.)

The book's an interpenetration of two: one, a series of funny anecdotes of life in Naples — misunderstandings, thefts, arguments, jokes, and the like, many of them funny enough to have caused me to laugh out loud in the reading. To cite only one, the epigraph to the seventh chapter:

"Put that cigarette out!" shouted the bus conductor.
"But I've only just had coffee."
"Ah, that's different."A. SAVIGNANO

Two, a series of philosophical dialogues, Platonic style, in which the Socratic method, lubricated by bottles of decent rosso, explore a fascinating view of the good life, essentially based on Epicurus.

I don't think it's giving too much away to mention Bellavista's main argument, which doesn't appear until that seventh chapter, "The Theory of Love and Liberty": might there be some organizing principle that can guide us toward that good life based, as Epicurus taught, on the moderate pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain?

Bellavista, a patient and good-natured fellow who discusses these things with a group of intelligent but relatively ill-educated and intellectually unambitions buddies, has just such an outlook, which he atributes to "a friend of mine in Milan, Giancarlo Galli, who may or may not be the journalist, writer, and economist profiled in Italian Wikipedia — another type to look up at Feltrinelli.

Bellavista's theory rests on the two basic human desires: for Love and Liberty. The first

is the feeling that impels us to seek the companionship of our fellows, and the acts of love are all the things we do in the attempt to share our joys and griefs with others. This reaching out to our fellow men is instinctive.Thus Spake Bellavista, p. 41

Straightforward enough. Liberty is a more recalcitrant of definition, but Bellavista does pretty well:

For some people liberty means democracy, for others it means anarchy, so at this point I shall have to spend a couple of minutes explaining exactly what I mean by liberty… I would define liberty as the simultaneous desire not to be oppressed oneself and not to oppress others.ibid., p. 107

Since both Love and Liberty have their opposites, Bellavista then lays his idea out on a coordinate system, as I mentioned here the other day, whose abscissa is a line from Hate to Love and whose ordinate is one from Power to Liberty. This results in four quarters, which I can't help but link to R.H. Blyth's four classifications of literature: objective objective, objective subjective, subjective objective, and — you guessed it: the worst of the lot, "wailing like a saxophone": subjective subjective.

Bellavista populates these quadrants with a number of familiar characters, depending on where they fall in these quadrants. The type fully committed to Love and neutral on the subject of Liberty (and it should be noted these qualities are necessarily in constant irreconcilable tension) is the Saint; his opposite is the Devil. The type fully committed to Liberty, on the other hand, and neutral on Love, is the Hermit; his opposite is the King. A "bad" King, who is driven by Hate, is the Tyrant; a "good" one is the Pope. Their opposites are the Sage and the Rebel.

In general of course we prefer those in the upper right-hand quadrant. The Scientist is a little more concerned with Liberty than with Love, the Poet reverses that tendency; both flank the Sage as nearly ideal types. What Bellavista argues for, in his sweet practical way, is a middle way, precisely the Sage's way, avoiding the complications attending the desire for Power and giving in to the seductions of Love, because, as Epicurus teaches us, one must love others if one is to be loved, and one must give others their way if one is to be allowed one's own.

I read Thus Spake Bellavista hard on the heels of What's the Economy For, Anyway?, by John de Graaf and Steven Batker, discussed here the other day. They make a perfect pairing: De Crescenzo supplies the theoretical element, entertainingly and persuasively; Batker and de Graaf the history of engineered society's attempt to institute (or, lately, evade) political approaches to achieving that element.

I increasingly believe the besetting problems with American society — from violence to pettiness — are grounded in an increasingly present antisocialism among individuals. Different people will supply different theories as to the reasons for this: breakdown of the family, institutionalization of education, defeat of organized labor, fractionalization of religious cults, glorification of individualism: the list can go on forever.

In the rage to find sources of this antisocialism, in order to institute corrective action, so far only De Crescenzo, in my experience, has brought the matter down to comfortable daily-life observations. It doesn't hurt that he leavens the investigation with a good deal of humor. I wish I could spend an evening with these two books, President Obama, Robert Reich, and a bottle of good red wine.

Bellavista's Middle Way

To contact us Click HERE
Eastside Road, January 7, 2013—•Luciano De Crescenzo: Thus Spake Bellavista: Naples, Love, and Liberty. Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni. New York: Grove Press, 1989.

WHY HAS IT TAKEN over twenty years for me to find out about this marvelous book? Oh well, quit complaining, Charles, and thank you, Giovanna; my eyes are now open.

De Crescenzo is well enough known in Italy, I'm sure; I'll have to look him up in a couple of weeks when I'm haunting Feltrinelli. I have the provisional feeling that he may have made a big splash with this book when it appeared in 1977 (as Così parlò Bellavista, a best seller in Italy); he followed it up with a number of sequels, and a film of the same title appeared in 1984. (Gotta look that up, too.)

The book's an interpenetration of two: one, a series of funny anecdotes of life in Naples — misunderstandings, thefts, arguments, jokes, and the like, many of them funny enough to have caused me to laugh out loud in the reading. To cite only one, the epigraph to the seventh chapter:

"Put that cigarette out!" shouted the bus conductor.
"But I've only just had coffee."
"Ah, that's different."A. SAVIGNANO

Two, a series of philosophical dialogues, Platonic style, in which the Socratic method, lubricated by bottles of decent rosso, explore a fascinating view of the good life, essentially based on Epicurus.

I don't think it's giving too much away to mention Bellavista's main argument, which doesn't appear until that seventh chapter, "The Theory of Love and Liberty": might there be some organizing principle that can guide us toward that good life based, as Epicurus taught, on the moderate pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain?

Bellavista, a patient and good-natured fellow who discusses these things with a group of intelligent but relatively ill-educated and intellectually unambitions buddies, has just such an outlook, which he atributes to "a friend of mine in Milan, Giancarlo Galli, who may or may not be the journalist, writer, and economist profiled in Italian Wikipedia — another type to look up at Feltrinelli.

Bellavista's theory rests on the two basic human desires: for Love and Liberty. The first

is the feeling that impels us to seek the companionship of our fellows, and the acts of love are all the things we do in the attempt to share our joys and griefs with others. This reaching out to our fellow men is instinctive.Thus Spake Bellavista, p. 41

Straightforward enough. Liberty is a more recalcitrant of definition, but Bellavista does pretty well:

For some people liberty means democracy, for others it means anarchy, so at this point I shall have to spend a couple of minutes explaining exactly what I mean by liberty… I would define liberty as the simultaneous desire not to be oppressed oneself and not to oppress others.ibid., p. 107

Since both Love and Liberty have their opposites, Bellavista then lays his idea out on a coordinate system, as I mentioned here the other day, whose abscissa is a line from Hate to Love and whose ordinate is one from Power to Liberty. This results in four quarters, which I can't help but link to R.H. Blyth's four classifications of literature: objective objective, objective subjective, subjective objective, and — you guessed it: the worst of the lot, "wailing like a saxophone": subjective subjective.

Bellavista populates these quadrants with a number of familiar characters, depending on where they fall in these quadrants. The type fully committed to Love and neutral on the subject of Liberty (and it should be noted these qualities are necessarily in constant irreconcilable tension) is the Saint; his opposite is the Devil. The type fully committed to Liberty, on the other hand, and neutral on Love, is the Hermit; his opposite is the King. A "bad" King, who is driven by Hate, is the Tyrant; a "good" one is the Pope. Their opposites are the Sage and the Rebel.

In general of course we prefer those in the upper right-hand quadrant. The Scientist is a little more concerned with Liberty than with Love, the Poet reverses that tendency; both flank the Sage as nearly ideal types. What Bellavista argues for, in his sweet practical way, is a middle way, precisely the Sage's way, avoiding the complications attending the desire for Power and giving in to the seductions of Love, because, as Epicurus teaches us, one must love others if one is to be loved, and one must give others their way if one is to be allowed one's own.

I read Thus Spake Bellavista hard on the heels of What's the Economy For, Anyway?, by John de Graaf and Steven Batker, discussed here the other day. They make a perfect pairing: De Crescenzo supplies the theoretical element, entertainingly and persuasively; Batker and de Graaf the history of engineered society's attempt to institute (or, lately, evade) political approaches to achieving that element.

I increasingly believe the besetting problems with American society — from violence to pettiness — are grounded in an increasingly present antisocialism among individuals. Different people will supply different theories as to the reasons for this: breakdown of the family, institutionalization of education, defeat of organized labor, fractionalization of religious cults, glorification of individualism: the list can go on forever.

In the rage to find sources of this antisocialism, in order to institute corrective action, so far only De Crescenzo, in my experience, has brought the matter down to comfortable daily-life observations. It doesn't hurt that he leavens the investigation with a good deal of humor. I wish I could spend an evening with these two books, President Obama, Robert Reich, and a bottle of good red wine.

The Sense of an Ending — and of momon, irony, and recursion

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WHAT IS IT with all those online reviews of Julian Barnes's novel The Sense of an Ending, anyway? Is it simply that "irony," so much in the air these days, is so often used erroneously (hence the scare quotes), that Barnes's recursiveness escapes these quick-to-comment readers?

The book is a novel, told first-person, whose plot hinges on the narrator's attempt to understand, forty years on, the events set in motion by an early love affair as it intersected with youthful friendships. Both the point and the method of the narrative are described in a jocular definition of "history," offered by one of those friends in a history class:

"'History is that certainty produced at the point when the mperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.'"—The Sense of an Ending, p. 18

History — from Greek ἱστοÏ�ία - historia, meaning "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation," ever-helpful Wikipedia tells us — is a particular example of "understanding": an approach to an awareness of the significance of past events as they relate to one another and thereby to the present (including, by extension, the future as it may be inflected by the present).

The Sense of an Ending is a parable of the historical process, written three years after Barnes's memoir-contemplation Nothing to be Frightened Of, which meant a great deal to me when I read it a year ago, as my blog post at the time indicates:

Barnes loops gracefully through confrontations with these four principal themes (death; dying; God; religion; remember?) and more; interweaving funny stories about his childhood and his philosopher brother (who, oddly, lives at the near geographical center of France in order to teach in Geneva); and considering similar confrontations by a number of minds of the highest ranks.

["Loops"; "memoir-contemplation." I have always enjoyed Francis Ponge's mediation on what he calls momon."Texte qui inclut sa propre critique," says Larousse;

…toute Å“uvre d'art comportant sa propre caricature, ou dans laquelle l'auteur ridiculiserait son moyen d'expression. La Valse de Ravel est un momon. Ce genre est particulier aux époques où la rhétorique est perdue, se cherche.

says Ponge (Le Savon (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1967), p. 42-3.)*

The momon, a concept significant enough to be incorporated into English, hence no longer to be italicized here, is the intellectual attitude of our time, which is reeling still from the discoveries of Modernism, which depended on dispersal, acceleration and dispersal; and so lapsed into the kind of apparent chaos every generation perceives in its own context. Earlier generations found refuge in such chaos in religion, in Enlightenment, in mechanics; my generation found it in the momon.

And I just notice now that "loops" is "spool," backward: it is not true, ironically, that no loops spool on.]

The method of The Sense of an Ending involves momon, and recursion; it is a literary form of what Wikipedia calls "Droste effect" and heraldry refers to as mise en abyme, where abyme means not really "abyss' but something closer to "vortex": in fact, center. I first noticed this effect when I was a little boy, seeing the label of an evaporated-milk can, whose picture reproduced itself. Later, of course, another version of mise en abyme struck me in the barber shop.

I think every observant child, and aren't they all, discovers mise en abyme, and that the event and its effect are significant in the shaping of the growing consciousness. (Interesting to speculate on the result of the delay of such awareness in societies lacking mirrors or evaporated milk.) And as the first awareness of this kind of recursion comes early in life, the particular sort of reflection on its significance often comes late in life… "when rhetoric, being lost, seeks itself," as Ponge says (or "dying, examines itself," in Dunlop's thoughtful translation).

Many of the online detractors of The Sense of an Ending fixate on the personalities of the principal characters and overlook the meditation Barnes centers on them — they don't see the label for the cow, the mirrors for the image reflected by them. Of course the danger of any rhetorical figure, whether or not perdue, is that it will distract its audience from the meaning the figure is intended to convey. I suppose it's the irony of our time that so many no longer understand the meaning of "irony," and take it to mean merely a state of being hiply flippant.




_____
*"…any work of art including its own caricature, or one in which the author was to ridicule his means of expression. The Waltz of Ravel is a momon. The genre is peculiar to periods in which rhetoric, dying, examines itself." Ponge: Soap, tr. Lane Dunlop (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), p. 33.

Bellavista's Middle Way

To contact us Click HERE
Eastside Road, January 7, 2013—•Luciano De Crescenzo: Thus Spake Bellavista: Naples, Love, and Liberty. Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni. New York: Grove Press, 1989.

WHY HAS IT TAKEN over twenty years for me to find out about this marvelous book? Oh well, quit complaining, Charles, and thank you, Giovanna; my eyes are now open.

De Crescenzo is well enough known in Italy, I'm sure; I'll have to look him up in a couple of weeks when I'm haunting Feltrinelli. I have the provisional feeling that he may have made a big splash with this book when it appeared in 1977 (as Così parlò Bellavista, a best seller in Italy); he followed it up with a number of sequels, and a film of the same title appeared in 1984. (Gotta look that up, too.)

The book's an interpenetration of two: one, a series of funny anecdotes of life in Naples — misunderstandings, thefts, arguments, jokes, and the like, many of them funny enough to have caused me to laugh out loud in the reading. To cite only one, the epigraph to the seventh chapter:

"Put that cigarette out!" shouted the bus conductor.
"But I've only just had coffee."
"Ah, that's different."A. SAVIGNANO

Two, a series of philosophical dialogues, Platonic style, in which the Socratic method, lubricated by bottles of decent rosso, explore a fascinating view of the good life, essentially based on Epicurus.

I don't think it's giving too much away to mention Bellavista's main argument, which doesn't appear until that seventh chapter, "The Theory of Love and Liberty": might there be some organizing principle that can guide us toward that good life based, as Epicurus taught, on the moderate pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain?

Bellavista, a patient and good-natured fellow who discusses these things with a group of intelligent but relatively ill-educated and intellectually unambitions buddies, has just such an outlook, which he atributes to "a friend of mine in Milan, Giancarlo Galli, who may or may not be the journalist, writer, and economist profiled in Italian Wikipedia — another type to look up at Feltrinelli.

Bellavista's theory rests on the two basic human desires: for Love and Liberty. The first

is the feeling that impels us to seek the companionship of our fellows, and the acts of love are all the things we do in the attempt to share our joys and griefs with others. This reaching out to our fellow men is instinctive.Thus Spake Bellavista, p. 41

Straightforward enough. Liberty is a more recalcitrant of definition, but Bellavista does pretty well:

For some people liberty means democracy, for others it means anarchy, so at this point I shall have to spend a couple of minutes explaining exactly what I mean by liberty… I would define liberty as the simultaneous desire not to be oppressed oneself and not to oppress others.ibid., p. 107

Since both Love and Liberty have their opposites, Bellavista then lays his idea out on a coordinate system, as I mentioned here the other day, whose abscissa is a line from Hate to Love and whose ordinate is one from Power to Liberty. This results in four quarters, which I can't help but link to R.H. Blyth's four classifications of literature: objective objective, objective subjective, subjective objective, and — you guessed it: the worst of the lot, "wailing like a saxophone": subjective subjective.

Bellavista populates these quadrants with a number of familiar characters, depending on where they fall in these quadrants. The type fully committed to Love and neutral on the subject of Liberty (and it should be noted these qualities are necessarily in constant irreconcilable tension) is the Saint; his opposite is the Devil. The type fully committed to Liberty, on the other hand, and neutral on Love, is the Hermit; his opposite is the King. A "bad" King, who is driven by Hate, is the Tyrant; a "good" one is the Pope. Their opposites are the Sage and the Rebel.

In general of course we prefer those in the upper right-hand quadrant. The Scientist is a little more concerned with Liberty than with Love, the Poet reverses that tendency; both flank the Sage as nearly ideal types. What Bellavista argues for, in his sweet practical way, is a middle way, precisely the Sage's way, avoiding the complications attending the desire for Power and giving in to the seductions of Love, because, as Epicurus teaches us, one must love others if one is to be loved, and one must give others their way if one is to be allowed one's own.

I read Thus Spake Bellavista hard on the heels of What's the Economy For, Anyway?, by John de Graaf and Steven Batker, discussed here the other day. They make a perfect pairing: De Crescenzo supplies the theoretical element, entertainingly and persuasively; Batker and de Graaf the history of engineered society's attempt to institute (or, lately, evade) political approaches to achieving that element.

I increasingly believe the besetting problems with American society — from violence to pettiness — are grounded in an increasingly present antisocialism among individuals. Different people will supply different theories as to the reasons for this: breakdown of the family, institutionalization of education, defeat of organized labor, fractionalization of religious cults, glorification of individualism: the list can go on forever.

In the rage to find sources of this antisocialism, in order to institute corrective action, so far only De Crescenzo, in my experience, has brought the matter down to comfortable daily-life observations. It doesn't hurt that he leavens the investigation with a good deal of humor. I wish I could spend an evening with these two books, President Obama, Robert Reich, and a bottle of good red wine.

Bellavista's Middle Way

To contact us Click HERE
Eastside Road, January 7, 2013—•Luciano De Crescenzo: Thus Spake Bellavista: Naples, Love, and Liberty. Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni. New York: Grove Press, 1989.

WHY HAS IT TAKEN over twenty years for me to find out about this marvelous book? Oh well, quit complaining, Charles, and thank you, Giovanna; my eyes are now open.

De Crescenzo is well enough known in Italy, I'm sure; I'll have to look him up in a couple of weeks when I'm haunting Feltrinelli. I have the provisional feeling that he may have made a big splash with this book when it appeared in 1977 (as Così parlò Bellavista, a best seller in Italy); he followed it up with a number of sequels, and a film of the same title appeared in 1984. (Gotta look that up, too.)

The book's an interpenetration of two: one, a series of funny anecdotes of life in Naples — misunderstandings, thefts, arguments, jokes, and the like, many of them funny enough to have caused me to laugh out loud in the reading. To cite only one, the epigraph to the seventh chapter:

"Put that cigarette out!" shouted the bus conductor.
"But I've only just had coffee."
"Ah, that's different."A. SAVIGNANO

Two, a series of philosophical dialogues, Platonic style, in which the Socratic method, lubricated by bottles of decent rosso, explore a fascinating view of the good life, essentially based on Epicurus.

I don't think it's giving too much away to mention Bellavista's main argument, which doesn't appear until that seventh chapter, "The Theory of Love and Liberty": might there be some organizing principle that can guide us toward that good life based, as Epicurus taught, on the moderate pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain?

Bellavista, a patient and good-natured fellow who discusses these things with a group of intelligent but relatively ill-educated and intellectually unambitions buddies, has just such an outlook, which he atributes to "a friend of mine in Milan, Giancarlo Galli, who may or may not be the journalist, writer, and economist profiled in Italian Wikipedia — another type to look up at Feltrinelli.

Bellavista's theory rests on the two basic human desires: for Love and Liberty. The first

is the feeling that impels us to seek the companionship of our fellows, and the acts of love are all the things we do in the attempt to share our joys and griefs with others. This reaching out to our fellow men is instinctive.Thus Spake Bellavista, p. 41

Straightforward enough. Liberty is a more recalcitrant of definition, but Bellavista does pretty well:

For some people liberty means democracy, for others it means anarchy, so at this point I shall have to spend a couple of minutes explaining exactly what I mean by liberty… I would define liberty as the simultaneous desire not to be oppressed oneself and not to oppress others.ibid., p. 107

Since both Love and Liberty have their opposites, Bellavista then lays his idea out on a coordinate system, as I mentioned here the other day, whose abscissa is a line from Hate to Love and whose ordinate is one from Power to Liberty. This results in four quarters, which I can't help but link to R.H. Blyth's four classifications of literature: objective objective, objective subjective, subjective objective, and — you guessed it: the worst of the lot, "wailing like a saxophone": subjective subjective.

Bellavista populates these quadrants with a number of familiar characters, depending on where they fall in these quadrants. The type fully committed to Love and neutral on the subject of Liberty (and it should be noted these qualities are necessarily in constant irreconcilable tension) is the Saint; his opposite is the Devil. The type fully committed to Liberty, on the other hand, and neutral on Love, is the Hermit; his opposite is the King. A "bad" King, who is driven by Hate, is the Tyrant; a "good" one is the Pope. Their opposites are the Sage and the Rebel.

In general of course we prefer those in the upper right-hand quadrant. The Scientist is a little more concerned with Liberty than with Love, the Poet reverses that tendency; both flank the Sage as nearly ideal types. What Bellavista argues for, in his sweet practical way, is a middle way, precisely the Sage's way, avoiding the complications attending the desire for Power and giving in to the seductions of Love, because, as Epicurus teaches us, one must love others if one is to be loved, and one must give others their way if one is to be allowed one's own.

I read Thus Spake Bellavista hard on the heels of What's the Economy For, Anyway?, by John de Graaf and Steven Batker, discussed here the other day. They make a perfect pairing: De Crescenzo supplies the theoretical element, entertainingly and persuasively; Batker and de Graaf the history of engineered society's attempt to institute (or, lately, evade) political approaches to achieving that element.

I increasingly believe the besetting problems with American society — from violence to pettiness — are grounded in an increasingly present antisocialism among individuals. Different people will supply different theories as to the reasons for this: breakdown of the family, institutionalization of education, defeat of organized labor, fractionalization of religious cults, glorification of individualism: the list can go on forever.

In the rage to find sources of this antisocialism, in order to institute corrective action, so far only De Crescenzo, in my experience, has brought the matter down to comfortable daily-life observations. It doesn't hurt that he leavens the investigation with a good deal of humor. I wish I could spend an evening with these two books, President Obama, Robert Reich, and a bottle of good red wine.

Bellavista's Middle Way

To contact us Click HERE
Eastside Road, January 7, 2013—•Luciano De Crescenzo: Thus Spake Bellavista: Naples, Love, and Liberty. Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni. New York: Grove Press, 1989.

WHY HAS IT TAKEN over twenty years for me to find out about this marvelous book? Oh well, quit complaining, Charles, and thank you, Giovanna; my eyes are now open.

De Crescenzo is well enough known in Italy, I'm sure; I'll have to look him up in a couple of weeks when I'm haunting Feltrinelli. I have the provisional feeling that he may have made a big splash with this book when it appeared in 1977 (as Così parlò Bellavista, a best seller in Italy); he followed it up with a number of sequels, and a film of the same title appeared in 1984. (Gotta look that up, too.)

The book's an interpenetration of two: one, a series of funny anecdotes of life in Naples — misunderstandings, thefts, arguments, jokes, and the like, many of them funny enough to have caused me to laugh out loud in the reading. To cite only one, the epigraph to the seventh chapter:

"Put that cigarette out!" shouted the bus conductor.
"But I've only just had coffee."
"Ah, that's different."A. SAVIGNANO

Two, a series of philosophical dialogues, Platonic style, in which the Socratic method, lubricated by bottles of decent rosso, explore a fascinating view of the good life, essentially based on Epicurus.

I don't think it's giving too much away to mention Bellavista's main argument, which doesn't appear until that seventh chapter, "The Theory of Love and Liberty": might there be some organizing principle that can guide us toward that good life based, as Epicurus taught, on the moderate pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain?

Bellavista, a patient and good-natured fellow who discusses these things with a group of intelligent but relatively ill-educated and intellectually unambitions buddies, has just such an outlook, which he atributes to "a friend of mine in Milan, Giancarlo Galli, who may or may not be the journalist, writer, and economist profiled in Italian Wikipedia — another type to look up at Feltrinelli.

Bellavista's theory rests on the two basic human desires: for Love and Liberty. The first

is the feeling that impels us to seek the companionship of our fellows, and the acts of love are all the things we do in the attempt to share our joys and griefs with others. This reaching out to our fellow men is instinctive.Thus Spake Bellavista, p. 41

Straightforward enough. Liberty is a more recalcitrant of definition, but Bellavista does pretty well:

For some people liberty means democracy, for others it means anarchy, so at this point I shall have to spend a couple of minutes explaining exactly what I mean by liberty… I would define liberty as the simultaneous desire not to be oppressed oneself and not to oppress others.ibid., p. 107

Since both Love and Liberty have their opposites, Bellavista then lays his idea out on a coordinate system, as I mentioned here the other day, whose abscissa is a line from Hate to Love and whose ordinate is one from Power to Liberty. This results in four quarters, which I can't help but link to R.H. Blyth's four classifications of literature: objective objective, objective subjective, subjective objective, and — you guessed it: the worst of the lot, "wailing like a saxophone": subjective subjective.

Bellavista populates these quadrants with a number of familiar characters, depending on where they fall in these quadrants. The type fully committed to Love and neutral on the subject of Liberty (and it should be noted these qualities are necessarily in constant irreconcilable tension) is the Saint; his opposite is the Devil. The type fully committed to Liberty, on the other hand, and neutral on Love, is the Hermit; his opposite is the King. A "bad" King, who is driven by Hate, is the Tyrant; a "good" one is the Pope. Their opposites are the Sage and the Rebel.

In general of course we prefer those in the upper right-hand quadrant. The Scientist is a little more concerned with Liberty than with Love, the Poet reverses that tendency; both flank the Sage as nearly ideal types. What Bellavista argues for, in his sweet practical way, is a middle way, precisely the Sage's way, avoiding the complications attending the desire for Power and giving in to the seductions of Love, because, as Epicurus teaches us, one must love others if one is to be loved, and one must give others their way if one is to be allowed one's own.

I read Thus Spake Bellavista hard on the heels of What's the Economy For, Anyway?, by John de Graaf and Steven Batker, discussed here the other day. They make a perfect pairing: De Crescenzo supplies the theoretical element, entertainingly and persuasively; Batker and de Graaf the history of engineered society's attempt to institute (or, lately, evade) political approaches to achieving that element.

I increasingly believe the besetting problems with American society — from violence to pettiness — are grounded in an increasingly present antisocialism among individuals. Different people will supply different theories as to the reasons for this: breakdown of the family, institutionalization of education, defeat of organized labor, fractionalization of religious cults, glorification of individualism: the list can go on forever.

In the rage to find sources of this antisocialism, in order to institute corrective action, so far only De Crescenzo, in my experience, has brought the matter down to comfortable daily-life observations. It doesn't hurt that he leavens the investigation with a good deal of humor. I wish I could spend an evening with these two books, President Obama, Robert Reich, and a bottle of good red wine.