Wallis Wilde - Menozzi

Essays are trees in a deforested world. The more I explore this generous and sturdy form, the more I wish to place them on bare hills, eroded banks, hoping they will grow far larger than when they were written.

Essays should dazzle but not blind. They need to invite a reader to sit, to mull, to climb further up in search of fruit. Once found, fruit,too, can be bitter, sting, but what's the point of something without taste? Sometimes an essay holds a tended nest,and birds hatch right before the reader's eyes.

Southwest Review, Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Frank, Agni, The Tel Aviv Review, Granta, The Notre Dame Review,International Quarterly, The International Herald Tribune-Italy Daily are journals where my essays can be found.

The butterfly was as small for a butterfly as I was tall for a woman. What I mean is that the orange-winged creature that zigzagged to my shoulder on a May day in Parma, Italy, where I was talking to the postman, was not much bigger than two of my unpainted fingernails. I was as tall as the lilacs in our yard or the hibiscus, as tall as any of the willowy plants that had hungrily reached up over the fence to get beyond the fence, beyond the dark of a shaded yard. Of course, I had not grown because I was looking for light; my American parents long ago attributed my height to my father's statuesque ancestors on the Baltic Sea. But my inner world, that silent story which tells itself to us, felt very much like the bent and slightly deformed plants that found a way to receive what they needed in another yard. My neighbor enjoyed the blooms: the double mauve lilacs, the hibiscus with saucy tongues.

What still brings sharp tears to my eyes, when I think about what happened next, is how life occasionally rustles, as if the every-day is caught and thrown back by a curtain's deep folds. The mind finds itself touching reality beyond ordinary dimensions. ...

"An Italian doctor I know, who loves music, does research on babies by playing Bartòk to them as they grow in their mother's wombs.
In the first month after birth, when the Microcosmos is replayed, their innocent brain impulses undulate on his monitor in bright, active movements of recognition, as bright as when they feel their mother's breast. The doctor's results, which he will continue to explore, say many things that scientists cannot yet sum up about neurology and music's intricate influences. But his work suggests that music is a force whose messages can penetrate the skin, travelling across the earliest tenebrous dark we rock in. In the brain, music finds ground prepared for it, matter primed to receive its marks. We now know the interaction subtly and with individual differences alters the chemistry of our blood."

"An actress offered me the tapes of a two-hour interview with Natalia Ginzburg made in April 1991 six months before her death at age seventy-five. The brown, magnetic scrolls unwound a much-mourned presence: Natalia Ginzburg's voice. Robust, weathered and warm, her laughter revealed wisdom. I think I could also hear (perhaps because so many people had mentioned it to me) signs of Ginzburg's mask: pain that had not been given in to.
Apparent in the crunchy bits of verisimilitude is Natalia Ginzburg's fascination: complexity, although she was characterized as simple; disarming openness, while labeled shy; "officially" lazy, although her production belies this. Both Catholic and Jew, a nonideologue who followed her instincts, an independent who was an elected communist MP, a declared nonfeminist although her subject was family, maternity, the dispossessed. A cat lover who perpetually chose practical shoes and blue suits is a quick snapshot: she had the emotional depth and strength of ego to live beyond fixed moral schemes. Tolerant but decided, she said:
“Family is a necessity. It can be repressive, obsessive, but in some way it is the necessary pedestal for becoming an adult. No substitute exists for it. Nothing can take its place. You can try to make relationships better, closer, freer, but not substitute the family. No substitute exists. This isn't a political thing….”"

"On April 11, 1987, Primo Levi died. The horror of the news was somewhat similar to hearing that an inviolate cathedral had suddenly collapsed. It remains difficult even now, two years after his suicide, to accept that irrevocable fact and to comprehend Levi's last decision.
In the 1980s, Italy lost some of the most imaginative writers of the twentieth century: Eugenio Montale, Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante. Each announcement came like another blast of dehumanizing change that sweeps before it the older, nobler remnants of a more rigorous civilization. The complex, harsh circumstances that had nourished the creative processes of these writers - above all, the Second World War, the realities of ideological conflicts, the deep and tangled origins of lay and religious intellectual culture - seemed as unrepeatable and lost as Roman coins in the clatter and contradictions of post-industrial Italy. With each death, the sharp sense of a greatness passing grew deeper. And, then, as if the capricious forces of the universe had not disturbed enough the literary constellations, a pure and noble Levi, in an inexplicable instant, became one of them.
Yet, unlike the other three, neither disappearance, nor end, nor silence is appropriate to describe the reality that he will write nothing more. His life, different from theirs, was altered by a new human form of desecration. Levi's starting point, "the fundamental experience of his life", was not aesthetic and would never allow his readers, once he began to write, to escape moral issues lying at the center not of art, but of reality and culture in this century."

"Over time, in the summing of any deep relationship, who gives and who receives? Where is the scale upon which affections can be weighed? How far do cracks reach in a mirror of water?" Iris Origo is writing in Italian about her friendship with Elsa Dallolio. The portrait -mainly shards from letters- is a rare cameo of an almost invisible genre: a woman putting into words the image of a woman friend. Origo wrote the quiet portrait to answer an unwritten oath to herself. Not to have brought this cherished relationship from memory into the light would have "falsified the whole picture" of what she had described as "meaningful" about her life. It was her last book and has never been translated.
Here is the same voice in her autobiography, explaining how any life fits into a larger frame because of its interweave with history or time: "It [her son's death] has left me believing the truth of Burke's remark that society -or I should prefer to say life itself- is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living and those who are dead and those who are to be born. Not only are we not alone, but we are not living in a bare and chilly now."
This biographer, who consistently found Boswell's "speck that gives life to an eye", is unknown to far too many lovers of Italy and of good writing. A historical biographer who asked herself on each page "are we really seeing what was being seen at the time?" Origo eventually crossed into the twentieth century and described her own life and its epic changes. As her writing matured, she drew closer to outlining the elusive metaphysical borders of the fictions and truths of the genre called self. When choosing among what Woolf called the "granite-like facts" and "rainbow-like intangibility" of a personality, she always searched for "the living face".

"Just the word "Yankee" on the cardboard box of the birdfeeder was enough to staunch the melancholy that often overwhelms me, a dyed-in-the-wool American living out my days on Italian soil.
Sometimes the ochers and greens and the pale wash on Parma buildings all pay off in a feeling of glorious gratitude for living in this spot: with the foothills inching towards the spiky Alps and humanity's long dramatic adaptation of the Po plain a humbling measure for one's own life. But sometimes I long for a leaner reality, something like Shaker furniture with strict lines, and a simpler one-one that can almost be tasted in the word
"Yankee": a clear-headed, feisty soul unafraid of challenging authority and willing to live an individual destiny in an uncertain state of grace.
There is no logic to the difficulties arising from changing cultures: it is like putting on another skin. When I hear myself saying, "Mamma mia, che disgrazia," instead of what I once meant-something more succinct, with more willpower involved-I feel quite surprised, even amused by the hyperbole. But on a bad day a voice inside repeats T.S. Eliot’s line: "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all." Anyway, in moments in which I think material objects will reestablish a piece of my invisible English-speaking identity, I often write to my sister with my requests. Thus when the idea of a birdfeeder came to mind as something missing in my daily landscape I asked her for one.
My sister is an island of understanding and reference for me. She holds my place on pages where I existed not only as a child, but as an adult whose values she shared. I can confide in her without feeling I will send her into a state of alarm. She is not one who rubs in the lovely gilted Giotto postcards she receives, by insisting that I can't expect to have everything. She understands what I mean when I say that I miss the "great wandering vegetative world," and the messy undictated possibilities of American life.
She responded immediately. With a combination of efficiency and care, the box arrived in time for last Christmas. It was accompanied by the usual sympathetic note: the unstated wish that it were easier for us to see each other more often. And then that good old Anglo Saxon habit of not dwelling on the unalterable: the birdfeeder was a brilliant idea and might do the trick."

 I write essays for Italy Daily a supplement of the International Hearld Tribune. Here is an exerpt from one of my film reviews.

"In the final scene of Nanni Moretti's latest film, "La Stanza del Figlio," a couple and their adolescent daughter walk separately along a Ligurian beach as the sunlight of the coming day spreads upon the sea. Andrea, the youngest family member, is present but missing. The powerful effects of his death, unperceived by outside observers, ripple and play without end.
 The new distances among the Sanfelice family members sum up the more than two-hour exploration of how grief levels the past and changes the future. Giovanni, a psychiatrist, can no longer practice because he cannot support his patients' maladies; Paola, an art publisher, feels unable to communicate; their daughter, Irene, instructed in life's cruelty, boils over with previously unknown anger.
 This sudden uncontrollable turmoil occurs while living goes on in a modern, normal Italy bustling with freeways, economic well-being, and competition, even for girls.
 Giovanni Moretti, a director who for three decades has analyzed society from a politically correct left angle through a character closely cloned from parts of himself this time proposes territory without political implications.
 "La Stanza del Figlio" concentrates on the hidden away and denied corrosion of grief - and raises interesting issues about the context in which it was created.
 The characters are unimaginable in an Italian film of even ten years ago. A psychiatrist father who tries to listen? A girl who plays basketball? An Italian mother who doesn't smother her children?"

<- In the Agni essay read about Vanda Scaravelli, one of the great women Yogis of this past century. She lived in Florence.

From an essay called "Paths over the Atlantic," to one called "Dante's Dark Woods," I have published a long series of personal essays that trace transformation within self and the subject of self. In 2009 a volume of these essays will be published in Italian under the title "L'Oceano é dentro di noi." It will also include literary essays on writers like Alksander Kushner, Miroslav Holub, and Daniel Berrigan--and tracing their transformations as writers. Rita Severi, Prof. of English literature at the university of Verona will be the translator. Moretti e Vitali is the publishing house.