ver these years, during my long stays and brief sojourns here, I have been, I think, both happy and unhappy in nearly equal measure. It didn't matter which, if only because I came here not for romantic purposes but to work, to finish a piece, to translate, to write a couple of poems, provided I could be that lucky; simply to be. That is, neither for a honeymoon (the closest I ever came to that was many years ago, on the island of Ischia, or else in Siena) nor for a divorce. And so I worked. Happiness or unhappiness would simply comein attendance, although sometimes they'd stay longer than I did, as if waiting on me. It is a virtue, I came to believe long ago, not to make a meal out of one's emotional life. There's always enough work to do, not to mention that there's world enough outside. In the end, there's always this city. As long as it exists, I don't believe that I, or, for that matter, anyone, can be mesmerized or blinded by romantic tragedy. I remember one day—the day I had to leave after a month here alone. I had just had lunch in some small trattoria on the remotest part of the Fondamente Nuove, grilled fish and half a bottle ofwine. With that inside, I set out for the place I was staying, to collect my bags and catch a vaporetto. I walked a quarter of a mile along the Fondamente Nuove, a small moving dot in that gigantic watercolor, and then turned right by the hospital of Giovanni e Paolo. The day was warm, sunny, the sky blue, all lovely. And with my back to the Fondamente and San Michele, hugging the wall of the hospital, almost rubbing it with my left shoulder and squinting at the sun, I suddenly felt: I am a cat. A cat that has just had fish. Had anyone addressed me at that moment, I would have meowed. I was absolutely, animally happy. Twelve hours later, of course, having landed in New York, I hit the worst possible mess in my life—or the one that appeared that way at the time. Yet tht" cat in me lingered; had it not been for that cat, I'd be climbing the walls now in some expensive i nstitution.
t night, there is not much to do here. Opera and church recitals are options, of course, but they require some initiative and arrangement: tickets and schedules and so forth. I am not good at that; it's rather like fixing a three-course meal all for yourself— perhaps even lonelier. Besides, my luck is suchthat whenever I considered an evening at La Fenice, they would be having a week-long run of Tchaikovsky or Wagner—equals, as far as my allergy is concerned. Never once Donizetti or Mozart! That leaves reading and strolling dully along, which is about the same, since at night these narrow stony gennels arc like passages between the bookshelves of some immense, forgotten library, and equally quiet. All the "books" are shut tight, and you guess what they are about only by the names on their spines, under the doorbell. Oh, there you can find your Donizettis and Rossinis, your Lullys and Frescobaldis! Maybe even a Mozart, maybe even a Haydn. Or else these streets are like wardrobe racks: all the clothes are of dark, peeling fabric, but the lining is ruby and shimmering gold. Goethe called this place the "republic of beavers," but perhaps Montesquieu with his resolute "un endroit ott H devrait n'avoir que des poissons" was more on the mark. For, now and then, across the canal, two or threewell-lit, tall, rounded windows, half shaded with gauze or tulle, reveal an octopal chandelier, the lacquered fin of a grand piano, opulent bronze framing auburn or rubescent oils, the gilded rib cage of a ceiling's beams—and you feel as though you are looking into a fish through its scales, and inside of it there's a party.
At a distance—across a canal—you can hardly tell the guests from their hostess. With all due respect to the best available creed, I must say I don't think this place has evolved from the famous chordate only, triumphant or not. I suspect and submit that, in the first place, it evolved from the very element that gave that chordate life and shelter and \vhich, for me at least, is synonymous with time. The element comes in many shapes and hues, with many different properties apart from those of Aphrodite and the Redeemer: lull, storm, crest, wave, froth, ripple, etc., not to mention the marine organisms. In my niind, this city limns all discernible patterns of the element and its contents. Splashing, glittering, glowing, glinting, the element has been casting itself upward for so long that it is not surprising that some ofthese aspects eventually acquired mass, flesh, and grew solid. Why it should have happened here, I have no idea. Presumably because the element here had heard Italian.
he eye is the most autonomous of our organs. It is so because the objects of its attention are inevitably situated on the outside. Except in a mirror, the eye never sees itself. It is the last to shut down when the body is falling asleep. It stays open when the body is stricken with paralysis or dead. The eye keeps registering reality even when there is no apparent reason for doing this, and under all circumstances. The question is: Why? And the answer is: Because the environment is hostile.
Eyesight is the instrument of adjustment to an environment which remains hostile no matter how well you have adjusted to it. The hostility of the environment grows proportionately to the length of your presence in it, and I am speaking not of old age only. In short, the eye is looking for safety. That explains the eye's predilection for art in general and Venetian art in particular. That explains the eye's appetite for beauty, as well as beauty's own existence. For beauty is solace, since beauty is safe. It doesn't threaten you with murder or make you sick. A statue of A polio doesn't bite, nor will Carpaccio's poodle. When the eye fails to find beauty—alias solace—it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to perceive virtue in ugliness. In the first instance, it relies on human genius; in the second, it draws on one's reservoir ofhumility. The latter is in greater supply, and like every majority tends to make laws. Let's have an illustration; let's take a young maiden. At a certain age oneeyes passing maidens without applied interest, without aspiring to mount them. Like a TV set left switched on in an abandoned apartment, the eye keeps sending in images of all these 5 '8" miracles, complete with light chestnut hair, Perugino ovals, gazelle eyes, nurselike bosoms, wasp waists, dark-green velvet dresses, and razor-sharp tendons. An eye may zero in on them in a church at someone's wedding or, worse still, in a bookstore's poetry section. Reasonably farsighted or resorting to the counsel of the car, the eye may learn their identities (which come with names as breathtaking as, say, Arabella Ferri) and, alas, their dishearteningly firm romantic affiliations. Regardless of such data's uselessness, the eye keeps collecting it. In fact, the more useless the data, the sharper the focus. The question is why, and the answer is that beauty is always external; also, that it is the exception to the rule. That's what—its location and its singularity—sends the eye oscillating wildlyor—in militant humility's parlance—roving. For beauty is where the eye rests. Aesthetic sense is the twin of one's instinct for self- preservation and is more reliable than ethics. Aesthetics' main tool, the eye, is absolutely autonomous. In its autonomy, it is inferior only to a tear.
tear can be shed in this place on several occasions. Assuming that beauty is the distribution of light in the fashion most congenial to one's retina, a tear is an acknowledgment of the retina's, as well as the tear's, failure to retain beauty. On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound. It is the deterioration of the greater speed to the lesser that moistens one's eye. Because one is finite, a departure from this place always feels final; leaving it behind is leaving it forever. For leaving is abanishment of the eye to the provinces of the other senses; at best, to the crevices and crevasses of the brain. For the eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention. And to the eye, for purely optical reasons, departure is not the body leaving the city but the city abandoning the pupil. Likewise, disappearance of the beloved, especially a gradual one, causes grief no matter who, and for what peripatetic reason, is actually in motion. As the world goes, this city is the eye's beloved. After it, everything is a letdown. A tear is the anticipation of the eye's future.