Vincere
IFC Films

Mid-August Lunch
Zeitgeist Films

Here, remarkably and remarkable, is a new film by Marco Bellocchio, a survivor of the Italian post-World War II directing galaxy. His first two films, Fist in His Pocket (1965) and China Is Near (1967), announced the arrival of a talented troublemaker. His subject was the bourgeois family in relation to a changing society--“the connection between the family and the wider political

Marcus Aurelius: A Life
By Frank McLynn
(Da Capo Press, 684 pp., $30)

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
By William B. Irvine
(Oxford University Press, 314 pp., $19.95)
 

In the past few days I’ve been reading the letters that Henry James wrote to the young sculptor Hendrik Andersen in the early years of the twentieth century. What fascinates me are the things that James has to say about the act of creation. He is begging his young friend to sacrifice the general to the specific, to express the boldest emotions through the subtlest formal calculations.

Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks

Edited by Daniel Esterman

(Getty Research Institute, 243 pp., $39.95)

I.

The details of his story aren’t the point,

nor is the listener, who looked as bored

as we, two accidental eavesdroppers

in a London restaurant. The point is, well,

his point, which after ten long minutes

he came to abruptly, and with a flourish,

saying slowly and in perfect seriousness,

“All we are is dust in the wind. All

we are. Is dust. In the wind.” I think

we bit our fingers to keep from laughing,

I know we mocked him through Paris, Barcelona,

Really, I don’t care if there is an American ambassador in Damascus. It’s true, given the environment, that he might be shot by terrorists. But, otherwise, why not? We had U.S. diplomats in Tokyo, Berlin and Rome until just after Pearl Harbor. Of course, they did no good. But probably, they also did no harm—except prolonging the illusion that America was at peace with the host countries. 

Why doesn't the administration just say that we are returning to our embassy in Syria because Syria is a player in the Middle East? Basta!

Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone

By Stanislao Pugliese

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 426 pp., $35)

In June 1950, Ignazio Silone and Arthur Koestler, two of the most prominent anti-communist writers of that era, attended a convivial dinner party in West Berlin. They had gathered with several other intellectuals to celebrate the founding conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an American-sponsored riposte to the Soviet Cominform’s “peace conferences” of the preceding year. Those were the early days of the Cold War, and more than a hundred Western writers, critics, and cultural figures had converged on the blockaded city of Berlin to demonstrate solidarity with its people and to resist the Soviet cultural and political offensive. According to Koestler’s wife, Mamaine, Koestler got drunk and repeatedly accused Silone of ignoring Koestler’s fraternal feelings for him. Silone was behaving, said Koestler, “as if he were a broad-bottomed Abruzzi peasant” and Koestler “a cosmopolitan gigolo.”

Silone made some mollifying remarks and claimed to be mystified by the outburst, but he was probably bluffing. Taciturn and even morose by inclination, and an uncharismatic speaker, he had the satisfaction of having just bested the loquacious Koestler in their public discussion about policy, while Koestler’s volubility reflected his own frustration at having lost the argument. The dispute had been about how best to respond to Soviet propaganda. Koestler advocated fighting fire with fire and carrying the propaganda war to the enemy by means of radio stations beamed at the satellite countries and the publication of books, magazines, and newspapers aimed at the Soviet bloc. Silone urged a less confrontational policy of promoting social and political reforms at home and merely showcasing Western cultural achievements abroad, so as to teach by example.

First, I'm back. And back from Rome, at that. I'm not sure that modern Romans actually appreciate the antiquity amidst which they live, an antiquity that goes back eight centuries before the birth of Christianity. Which means that the Etruscans, the Greeks, and the Jews were there before, well before the Romans.

In any highly fluid political situation, you will always find some observers determined to argue that it's not fluid at all--that underneath the surface, the status quo prevails, and anyone thinking otherwise is naive or poorly informed.

On September 3, 2000, Pope John Paul II, the Vicar of Christ beloved even by Jews, beatified Pius IX, one of his predecessors who reigned from 1846-1878. He was a nasty anti-Semite who re-established the ghetto in Rome and was instrumental in the kidnapping of a six-year old Jew boy who had been forcibly converted to Catholicism and whom the church itself kept in the Vatican away from his parents. These are not the least of his sins; nor are they the worst. But they contribute richly to his biography as a Jew-hater.

The Information Master:
Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System

By Jacob Soll

(University of Michigan Press,
277 pp., $65)

That resonant piece of verbal shorthand, TMI--or Too Much Information--would make a fine epigraph for our age. Anyone with an Internet connection today has access to exponentially greater quantities of writing, images, sound, and video than anyone on earth could have imagined just twenty years ago. Small wonder that we have become obsessed with the idea of "information" as an abstract substance independent of its content--something that we accumulate, measure, and "process," rather than ponder and understand. And small wonder that the management and control of information, whether by its "producers," by governments, or by corporations such as Google, has emerged as an increasingly important political concern, and as a subject of scholarship.

When I took over The New Republic in 1974 one of the first people I recruited--on a trip to Rome, as I recall--was Michael Ledeen, a scholar of Italian fascism. I think it was his doctoral supervisor and my friend, the great German Jewish historian, George Mosse, who suggested that we meet. But it actually was Claire Sterling, the brave journalist of uncomfortable truths, who introduced us. Michael was then working on a book about Gabriele d'Annunzio, the futurist poet, artist, fighter pilot, political theorist and neo-fascist adventurer who led a march on Fiume to keep it in Italian hands. The book was called D'Annunzio at Fiume.  (D'Annunzio was also legendary romantic and lover, having had among his affairs a especially tempestuous one with Eleanora Duse, perhaps the most renowned actress of the turn-of-the-century and Jewish besides. She was the model for Rodin's mournful bronze Teté de la doleur. Oh, how I wander.)

Michael is now widely thought of as a reactionary. This is the fate of many people who turn out to be uncannily correct early on about the cruel deceits of left-wing and anti-American movements. When we met for our first coffee at the Piazza Navona the good and the over-happy were beyond themselves with satisfaction that euro-communism was about to triumph all over western Europe. Ledeen dourly and correctly said "no." 

Landscape and Memory

by Simon Schama

(Knopf, 652 pp., $40)

We rush across the gleaming surface of the ocean, moving rapidly but smoothly above the untroubled beauty of the dark waters. Jagged cliffs and wild surf, rugged hills and lush grass pass beneath us. Music plays. Finally we reach our destination, where the action begins. It may be a prison from which a psychopathic bomber prepares to break out, or a clearing where poor Scottish farmers will discover the hanged bodies of their chiefs, or a village where women will be impregnated by aliens. Whatever the details of the action that follows, the sequence of images--from any one of the fashionable movie openings of the last two years or so--teaches the same lesson: nature is the realm of purity and beauty, and man imports violence to this separate world from his own corrupt and frightening habitat, the city.

It's not considered the height of political savvy here in the United States to point out that European lifestyles are greener than our own. Don't expect that line in an Obama speech anytime soon. Too many facets of European life—the cramped apartments, the clotheslines for drying laundry—would likely strike suburbanites as inconvenient, burdensome, or even downright primitive.

Caritas in Veritate:

On Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth

By Pope Benedict XVI

(Ignatius Press, 157 pp., $14.95)

I.

Are we facing an economic crisis? I do not mean the crisis of the credit markets that has wiped trillions off the global balance sheet and plunged the world into recession. I mean a spiritual crisis, of which the crash is but a symptom. According to Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, we are in the midst of a “late capitalist . . . countdown to social dissolution and the triumph of infinite exchangeability and timeless, atomized desire.” The only way to interrupt this countdown, he suggests, is for all of us to pattern our actions on divine love. A number of intellectuals--ranging from former Maoists such as Alain Badiou to dialectical materialists such as Slavoj Žižek--have made similar diagnoses, and proposed similar solutions. And to their company must now be added the pope.

In 1943, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who was living in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, wrote “Campo dei Fiori,” his great poem about the coexistence of normality and atrocity. The Campo dei Fiori is the plaza in Rome where, in the year 1600, the heretical philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned alive by the Catholic Church; “before the flames had died,” Milosz writes, “the taverns were full again.” The same willed blindness could be noted in Warsaw, the poem declares. Just outside the wall of the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jews were being starved and shot, a Ferris wheel was operating: “The bright melody drowned/the salvos from the ghetto wall,/and couples were flying/high in the cloudless sky.”

The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome

By Christopher Kelly

(W.W. Norton, 350 pp., $26.95)

Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age To the Present

By Christopher I. Beckwith

(Princeton University Press, 472 pp., $35)

The extraordinary reputation of Attila and his Huns requires an explanation, because they had so much competition. Their apogee, until Attila's death in 453, came just after the invasions that were extinguishing the Roman Empire in the west: the invasions of Germanic Alamanni, Burgundians, Ripuarian Franks, Salian Franks, Gepids, Greuthungi and Thervingi Goths, Heruli, Quadi, Rosomoni, Rugi, Sciri, Suevi, Taifali, and the original Vandals, as well as Alan horsemen of Iranic origin and probably Slavic Antae as well. Yet it is the Huns who are more vividly remembered than any of them, including Alaric's Goths, who in 410 had the historical distinction of being the first to sack Rome since the Gaulish raid of 387 B.C.E. (and to loot the accumulated wealth of centuries of empire); and more vividly remembered than the proverbial Vandals, who later inflicted greater damage by cutting off North Africa's grain supply to Italy.

I.

Monday, October 9

Dear Damon,

CATHOLIC MATTERS: CONFUSION, CONTROVERSY, AND THE SPLENDOR OF TRUTH

By Richard John Neuhaus

(Basic Books, 272 pp., $25)

As I was working on my last column, "On the Making of a Durable World," another instance of that rare aesthetic experience of transcending the distance that separates one generation from another, creating a common, enduring world, unexpectedly visited me.

Looking up at the towering, massive, early twentieth-century skyscraper that is the Municipal Building, I saw the names of my beloved city carved in Roman letters in a continuous line in blocks of stone: NEW AMSTERDAM MDCXXVI / MANAHATTA / NEW YORK MDCLXIV. Manahatta--what a beautiful name, I thought, so much more lyrical than New Amsterdam or New York or our present-day Manhattan, a name so lyrical that Whitman had written a lovely ode to it:

"Raphael: From Urbino to Rome" is now on exhibition at the National Gallery in London. It is a show I truly long to see not only because there are so few Raphaels in America that it is difficult to experience firsthand the oft-described transcendent force of "the immortal Raphael," as Vasari called him, but also because for a number of years now I have been working on a book in which the place of Raphael in the aesthetic imagination has become a central concern of my story.

The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans, and the Pope, September 1943-June 1944 By Robert Katz (Simon and Schuster, 418 pp., $28) Click here to purchase the book.