Astoria by Robert Viscusi

Author:Robert Viscusi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9781550714142
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Published: 2005-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

THE REVOLUTION

— All of this was supposed to prepare him to go toItaly, where he was going to use the French Revolution to explain the Italian migration.

— Idiot.

— Perhaps. His idea was that the Italian migration was not very well explained.

— The libraries are full of books.

— But not books about his question.

— Poor him. And what is his question?

— Down below in the Louvre, he saw himself in Michelangelo’s slaves. Down below in Les Invalides, he saw his mother in Napoléon’s tomb. Did they belong there? Did they belong to that, did that belong to them?

— That is his question?

— More or less.

— He expects to find books in the libraries to answer this question?

— Well, no. That is why he wrote his own book.

— He must have had some hell of a time in Italy with this project.

— Nor was this the end of it.

— What more can there be?

— He had another – an official – purpose as well. Just as he had gone to Paris to teach, so now he went to Italy on a grant to do specific research.

— To research this famous question of his?

— Not exactly. I am a professor. I write papers. While my mother was dying I was writing, and after she died I completed successfully, a paper about the body of Italy as it appears under the not-so-gentle hand with which Robert Browning composed The Ring and the Book. Sometimes you can write a hole into the sky, which is more or less how that paper changed my life, for thanks to the reception it found, two years later and all the while the Parisian sidewalks were giving me frost in the toes, I knew that, safe in an envelope at home, there was waiting the award of a grant that would allow me to go to Italy for a year, my family with me, following the extravagant path of the dangerous Robert Browning. And Italy. Browning and Italy. A rich subject full of unanticipated reversals and false motives slipping down the glaze on the porphyry pyramids at Santa Maria del Popolo.

What do you read during a tragedy? The hospital offers you a glistening collection of offprints from Reader’s Digest and Guideposts.

A mother died young. Her eldest child consoled himself remembering how she had called him to her bedside and said, “I must tell you a secret: you were always my favorite child.”

Her second child consoled herself by recalling how mother had summoned her to the scene of what was about to be her final moments and said, “Don’t tell the others, but you were always my favorite child.”

The third child – but let us draw the veil across this comedy and merely report that in like manner had she treated with this one.

Each child went forth after the (we may be certain) horrible death of the beautiful young matron and was not the brokenhearted orphan the mother had feared to leave behind but instead was whole and confident, happily

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