This is a vital guide to the life of Dante, a poet equal to Homer and Shakespeare, says AN Wilson

AN Wilson | The Times | August 7, 2021

[>> the book]

William Gladstone is not known for his jokes, but he was a learned amateur Dante scholar, and his essay arguing the case for Dante having studied at Oxford University still repays rereading. Of course, he did not mean it to be taken seriously, but it was written from the viewpoint of a man who had read everything there was to read around the subject. He argued that Dante never normally mentions rivers in the Divine Comedy unless he has seen them, and that the allusions to the Thames in the great poem must lead us to suppose that he once visited the Home of Lost Causes.

The point behind the Gladstonian joke is that Dante (1265-1321) tantalises biographers. So much of his work is about himself, so many of the references in the Divine Comedy and his other works can be verified, or checked, by reference to contemporary sources. Did he, for example, after his exile from Florence, go to Paris to study philosophy and theology as the 14^th century biographer Boccaccio attests? (It was Boccaccio who applied the epithet Divine to the work known to Dante simply as his Comedy — Comedy, not because it was intended as a medieval equivalent of PG Wodehouse, but because it is the reverse of tragic, it ends with a journey to Paradise and a vision of the ineffable.)

Dante draws on the long tradition of unreliable autobiography that could be said to begin with St Augustine’s Confessions. Dante tells us that he met Beatrice Portinari when he was nine and she was eight. The Beatrice of his dreams and poems, celebrated in La Vita Nuova (1294) and above all in the Divine Comedy, might have been this little girl, as Boccaccio tells us she was — who grew up and married a man called Simone dei Bardi and died in her twenties. But there is no proof that Dante’s Beatrice was this girl — and in the poetry she is so elevated and symbolic that she could just as well have been anyone.

There is no Gladstonian whimsy about Alessandro Barbero’s sober book, which sticks firmly to what can be known. It is difficult to imagine anyone seriously interested in Dante who will not want to own this book, because it weighs all the sources. It traces who Dante’s family were. They were prosperous, but not as aristocratic as he would have liked to suggest; they were mercantile, moneylending folk.

The poet aspired to knightly status. Barbero believes that he fought at the Battle of Campaldino in 1289, on the side of the Florentine Guelphs against the Ghibellines of Arezzo. The only source we have for this is Leonardo Bruni. The point, though, is Dante wanted us to think that he had been at this battle — “I have before now seen horsemen moving camp,” as he says in Inferno 22 — because he wants us to think he was of a knightly caste, rather than being the son of a moneylender. Dante was a poet who had a fervent political ambition, becoming a member of the various councils that administered the Republic of Florence, and became a prior, in effect a joint prime minister of the republic.

Florence, remember, was one of the largest cities in Europe in Dante’s day. The florin, its currency, was the one reliable coinage in Europe, which gave it huge prestige and political power. The very word “banco” (bench), is the object of furniture on which Florentines sat to lend and authenticate coinage to the popes, kings and potentates of the Continent. Dante’s frequent complaints that his native city had degenerated into a mere marketplace did not stop him, as Barbero shows, from accumulating a fortune himself, although his sense of his noble ancestry enables him to obscure, or actually fib about, the extent of his family’s involvement with banking and moneylending.

Barbero is a solid, reliable guide to the complex story of internecine Tuscan rivalries. Most readers of Dante will be aware that the Guelphs supported the Pope and the Guibellines the Holy Roman Emperor in their rivalries for dominance in European realpolitik. A general reader who starts to wonder about the difference between the White Guelphs and the Black Guelphs, and the mafia-style warfare in Florence between the separate factions, will definitely need some help, and this is patiently, coolly and wisely given here.

These rivalries rose to a head towards the close of the 13^th century, when Dante, as prior of the city, was 35, in what the opening of his famous poem calls “the middle of the journey of our life”. When Pope Boniface VIII asked the Florentines to supply him with men for his mercenary army, Dante was among those who spoke out against this. It counted against him. A little while later the Black Guelphs used this as the occasion for a ruthless putsch.

Dante and the other White Guelphs were driven out of Florence; their property was confiscated. Dante spent the last two decades of his life in exile, learning. After his exile, the documentation for Dante becomes much more sparse, but Barbero escorts us from the various aristocratic houses where he took refuge — with the Malaspina family in the Appenines, with the Della Scala in Verona, before settling in Ravenna and completing the Divine Comedy, which is such a curious blend of malice, hate, paranoia, mystic piety, love, wit, the scabrous, the spiritual.

We have to take Dante’s word for it that he was not guilty of the offences for which he was sent into exile — corruption and selling political offices. We can note from his writings that he changed his mind a great deal, beginning as a fervent Guelph, a supporter of the Pope, and ending as a sort of proto-fascistic worshipper of the emperor Henry VII, whom he implored to invade Italy, massacring the inhabitants as he did so, not sparing old women or children. As the Divine Comedy shows, Dante was not a sweetie pie. He was a product of his violent times and the belief that love moved the sun and other stars did not stop him cruelly imagining the physical torments of his enemies in hell.

So frequent are the references to actual people and actual events in his life that we need an accurate historian to escort us through the maze of fact and fiction. Barbero’s book, then, will be essential reading for anyone wanting to know the bare bones of Dante’s earthly pilgrimage.

This book begins by explaining that Dante and Shakespeare have been seen, next to Homer, as among the greatest of European poets, but Barbero admits that it will not tell you why. If you want a book that explains how Dante transformed the raw material of his life experience into the Divine Comedy, this is not it.

If you have not read the Comedy, you are in the position of someone who has never heard Bach’s St Matthew Passion, or seen Rome or Istanbul. You are missing out on something mind-blowingly stupendous. Buy a copy, preferably a parallel text such as Robin Kirkpatrick’s Penguin edition. When you have begun to realise that this poem is, among other things, the autobiography of a catastrophic political failure, who is shocked by the condition of the medieval church but who is also on a spiritual quest, you will want to know the facts.

How reliable is Dante’s version of the actual historical circumstances in which he lived? That is the moment when you reach for Barbero, and you will not find a better guide.

Gianni Rodari, who has been almost unknown in English till now, united a fantastical imagination with a deep interest in education

Joan Acocella | The New Yorker | December 7, 2020

[>> the book]

“Telephone Tales,” a collection of stories by the Italian children’s writer Gianni Rodari (1920-80), contains a piece called “The War of the Bells,” which begins, “Once upon a time, there was a war—a great and terrible war—in which vast numbers of soldiers died on both sides. We were on this side and our enemies were on the other, and we shot at each other day and night, but the war went on so long that finally, there was no more bronze to make cannons.” That didn’t stop “our” general. He ordered the army to melt down all the church bells in the land and recast them, together, to make a single cannon:

Just one, but one big enough to win the whole war with a single shot.
It took a hundred thousand cranes to lift that cannon; it took ninety-seven trains to transport it to the front. The Mega General rubbed his hands together in delight and said, “When my cannon fires, our enemies will run away all the way to the moon.”
The great moment arrived. The super cannon was aimed at the enemy. We’d all stuffed cotton wads into our ears. . . .
An artilleryman pushed a button. Suddenly, from one end of the front to the other, came the gigantic sound of pealing bells: Ding! Dong! Bong!
We took the cotton out of our ears to be able to hear it more clearly.

Yes, it was true. No cannon blast, just chimes. The opposing general, who had adopted the same strategy, got the same result. Whereupon the two commanders, greatly embarrassed, jumped into their jeeps and drove away. The soldiers, left with no means of killing one another, crawled out of the trenches and embraced. “Peace has broken out!” they cried.

In Italy, everyone knows who Gianni Rodari was: one of the country’s most cherished writers of children’s books. In the United States, practically nobody knows his name. Of his thirty books, not one was published here during his lifetime. A few came out in the U.K., and you can still get a copy of one of these translations, if, for example, you are willing to mortgage your house. The other day, I tried to buy “Tales Told by a Machine,” from 1976. Amazon had a hardcover copy, for nine hundred and sixty-seven dollars, plus shipping. This is a crime against art.

Things may be changing, though. In honor of the centenary, this year, of Rodari’s birth, a small, enterprising publisher in Brooklyn, Enchanted Lion, has brought out the first full English-language edition of “Telephone Tales,” in a spirited translation by Antony Shugaar. Now, albeit decades late, Anglophone readers can find out why Italians love this writer.

Gianni (Giovanni) Rodari was born in 1920 in Omegna, a quiet little town on the edge of Lake Orta, in northern Italy. His father was a baker. Gianni loved his father. Every day, he said, the man would make a dozen rolls out of white flour for him and his younger brother. “These rolls were very crisp, and we devoured them like gluttons,” he recalled. Another memory he recorded of his father was that one night, during a rainstorm, the family looked out the window and saw a cat marooned between two huge puddles, unable to move forward or back. The father went out, in the storm, and carried the cat to safety. When he returned, he was drenched. Rodari remembered him trembling, with his back pressed against the big oven, trying to get warm. Seven days later, he died, of pneumonia. Gianni was nine.

His mother moved the family back to her home town, Gavirate, near Milan. As Vanessa Roghi narrates in her new biography of Rodari— “Lezioni di Fantastica”, not yet translated—Gianni, in his teens, dreamed of going somewhere else, doing something interesting. (Maybe music? He had studied violin, and he played at weddings and such.) But the family needed money, and so he went to work as a teacher in local primary schools. He discovered that he was good at making up children’s stories, not so much because he wanted to, he said, but as a way of getting his students to sit down and pay attention. In his free time, he read hungrily, especially books on philosophy and politics. In 1940, Italy entered the Second World War. Rodari, who was in delicate health all his life, was excused from military service on medical grounds. Late in the war, after two of his friends had died in action and his brother Cesare, the one he had shared the rolls with, had been interned in a German prison camp, he joined the Resistance and enrolled in the Italian Communist Party.

After the war, the Party got in touch with him. Would he like to do some writing for its newspapers? In the next few years, Rodari produced copy—on sports, crime, the arts, everything—for Communist papers, one of which, L’Unità, finally asked him to write some pieces for children. In 1950, the Party transferred him to Rome, to edit a children’s weekly. And now he began publishing books, not just stories.

The Communist context of his writing is evident in the book that soon made his name, “The Adventures of Cipollino” (1951), in which a small onion-boy, Cipollino (the word means “little onion” in Italian), leads an uprising of aggrieved garden vegetables—Potato, Leek, Radish, et al.—against the tyranny of Prince Lemon and his brutal enforcer, Signor Tomato. Given the Cold War, it is no surprise that this book did not appear in English (Enchanted Lion hopes to publish a translation in 2022), or, conversely, that Rodari acquired a huge following in the Soviet Union, where “Cipollino” was adapted into an animated film, a live-action film, and even a ballet. Its hero’s sweet, bland face adorned a Russian postage stamp, and when the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Chernykh discovered a new minor planet, between Mars and Jupiter, he named it 2703 Rodari.

Gradually, Rodari’s reputation spread beyond leftist circles, and he acquired some literary friends. Italo Calvino, tiller of the same fields (folktales, new tales), admired him and stumped for him. But, like many autodidacts, Rodari was wary of the in-crowd, and he socialized mostly with newspapermen. In 1960, after being picked up by Giulio Einaudi, a politically unaffiliated and highly respected publisher (he published Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, Calvino), Rodari began to attract a mainstream audience. Eventually, he received the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing, a sort of children’s-literature equivalent of the Booker Prize.

“Telephone Tales” is from this period. The book has a frame story. Once upon a time, there was a man, Signor Bianchi, who worked as a travelling salesman of pharmaceutical goods, a job that kept him on the road six days a week. He had one child, a daughter (as did Rodari, who married in 1953), and she missed him when he was away. But they had a deal. Every night, before she went to sleep, he would call her and tell her a story. Long-distance calls were expensive, so the stories were always very short, but they were wonderful. When Signor Bianchi was on the line, Rodari wrote, “all the young ladies who worked the telephone switchboard simply stopped putting calls through, so they could listen.”

The sixty-seven tales in the collection show us where Rodari came from, and where he was going. A few are frank agitprop. Rodari had spent twenty-three years of his life under Fascism, and as the book’s translator, Antony Shugaar, has pointed out, the subject of a number of the stories is simply how not to be a Fascist. That’s what they say: Don’t kill one another, and don’t listen to bullies who tell you to do so. But in other tales we can see agitprop morphing into something more bizarre. In “The Unlucky Hunter,” a boy, Giuseppe, whose sister is getting married the next day is told by his mother to go hunting and bring back a rabbit to accompany the polenta at the nuptial feast. He goes off and soon spies a rabbit. But, when he shoots his rifle, what issues from the gun is not a bullet but a “cheerful, fresh little voice,” saying, “Boom!,” almost as if it were making fun of him. Next thing, “the same rabbit as before strolled by, right in front of Giuseppe, only this time it had a white veil over its head dotted with orange blossoms.” “ ‘Well, what do you know,’ said Giuseppe. ‘The rabbit is getting married too.’ ” This is like a Surrealist painting, half funny, half unsettling. A rabbit bride, a talking gun: what’s going on?

Part of what makes this story genuinely weird is that, unlike the chimes in “The War of the Bells,” which employs the same comic device, the unexpected sound is human. This sort of transfer, from one mode of expression to another, starts to become common in Rodari’s tales. In “A Distractible Child Goes for a Walk,” the child in question, Giovanni, taking a stroll, loses his body parts along the way. He is looking at this and that—the cars, the clouds—and, oops, his hand falls off. Then he gets interested in a dog with a limp, and as he follows the animal one of his arms detaches itself and vanishes. By the time he gets home, he’s missing both arms, both ears, and a leg. “His mother shakes her head, puts him back together.” (The neighbors have thoughtfully collected Giovanni’s body parts and brought them to her.) She kisses him. “ ‘Is anything missing, Mama? Have I been a good boy?’ ‘Yes, Giovanni, you’ve been a very good boy.’ ” This is sweet, and also appalling. When we leave the house, young readers might ask, do we have to be careful that our feet won’t fall off?

From the moment he began teaching, Rodari never stopped thinking about the education of children. He wrote about it, delivered lectures on it, gave interviews on it, to the end of his life. In 1972, to his great satisfaction, he was invited to confer for four days with a group of fifty teachers in the city of Reggio Emilia, a hot spot of postwar Italy’s vigorous early-education movement. The following year, he published a book, “The Grammar of Fantasy,” based on the talks he had given there. Here are the opening lines of Chapter 1, translated by the fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes:

A stone thrown into a pond sets in motion concentric waves that spread out on the surface of the water, and their reverberation has an effect on the water lilies and reeds, the paper boat, and the buoys of the fishermen at various distances. All these objects are just there for themselves, enjoying their tranquility, when they are wakened to life, as it were, and are compelled to react and to enter into contact with one another. Other invisible vibrations spread into the depths, in all directions, as the stone falls and brushes the algae, scaring the fish and continually causing new molecular movements. When it then touches the bottom, it stirs up the mud and bumps into things that have rested there forgotten, some of which are dislodged, others buried once again in the sand.

How I love this image, with its dark, wet, secret transactions, its mud and molecules. This is Rodari’s metaphor for cognition. In his view, children learned not by having something jammed into their brains—the multiplication tables, the sonnets of Petrarch—but by responding, almost involuntarily, to a sight, an idea, or often just a word, absorbing it, moving other mental contents around to make room for it, and thereby creating something new.

There seems to be no question that Rodari’s concern for education was related to the poverty of his youth. A modest man, he spoke not of his own difficulties but of other people’s—his mother’s, for example. She went to work at the age of eight, he wrote, first in a paper factory, then in a textile works, then as a domestic. When he began teaching, his pupils, too, were poor. In the winter, some could not come to school, because they had no shoes. Many of them also spoke a non-standard Italian, and he worried lest people make them feel embarrassed.

Apart from his students’ ability to get to school, what most concerned Rodari was the development of their imaginations. He said that a line of Novalis’s, which he read as a young man, always stuck in his mind: “If there were a theory of the fantastic such as there is in the case of logic, then we would be able to discover the art of inventing stories.” This he connected with fantasist art of his own time, above all Surrealism. Surrealism is a brew of many ideas, but the one most important to Rodari, it seems, was the simplest, the pairing of opposites—particularly the joining of a dream world to a punctilious realism. A hardy movement, Surrealism lasted from the nineteen-twenties until well after the Second World War, because it fit those wild and disastrous years. A locus classicus is Vittorio De Sica’s breakthrough film, “Miracle in Milan” (1951), which ends with a collection of homeless people who have just seen their shantytown razed by the authorities, taking off, on broomsticks, into the sky. Italy, after the war, was very, very poor. De Sica’s other early films—“Shoeshine,” “Bicycle Thieves,” “Umberto D.”—give a sense of this, as do Rossellini’s “Paisan” and “Rome, Open City.” The country was also humiliated. Many Italian artists were glad to move into new territory. Surrealism provided a picture of the truth they now faced—ugliness, violence, ruin—combined, however, with the memory of a happier past: trees, pocket watches, town squares, pretty women.

Many of the early Surrealists were committed Marxists. In “The Grammar of Fantasy,” Rodari writes of a day that he spent drinking wine with friends in a village outside Kazan, near the Volga. The group visited a local landmark, a wooden house whose furniture, he noticed, was curiously arranged. Sturdy benches were set under the windowsills, so that the erstwhile owners’ children, who liked to come in and out by the windows rather than by the door, could do so without breaking their necks. This, Rodari later decided, was a lesson of Communism. As it turned out, the house had once been the property of Lenin’s grandfather. Whether or not Lenin adapted his political philosophy from his grandparent’s furniture arrangements, Rodari learned critical thinking from Marxist doctrine. Whatever he writes about, he subjects to questioning, scrutiny, a mild irradiation of irony, or just wit. (Rodari inherited this approach in part, he said, from Russian formalist critics of the early twentieth century such as Viktor Shklovsky, who called it ostranenie, defamiliarization.) People in the West tend to associate Marxism with thought control. It is hard to convince them that, in the late nineteenth century, Marxism was considered by its adherents to be the standard-bearer of thought liberation.

In keeping with Rodari’s concern for children’s imaginations, some stories in “Telephone Tales,” like the stone in the pond in “The Grammar of Fantasy,” journey into distant realms of strangeness. Two of them feature a little girl named Alice Tumbledown. Alice falls a lot, into places where we wouldn’t think to look for a missing child. Her favorite landing place is the silverware drawer in the kitchen. She loves it there, in the spoon section. One time, her grandfather finds her inside the alarm clock. Later, he has to fish her out of a bottle. “I was thirsty and fell in,” she explains. Elsewhere, Alice wanders into the ocean. She’d like to become a starfish, she thinks:

But instead she fell into the shell of a giant mollusk just as it was yawning, and it immediately snapped shut its valves, imprisoning Alice and all her dreams. Here I am, in trouble again, thought Alice. But she also felt what silence—what fresh, cool peace—was there inside the giant mollusk. It would have been wonderful to stay there forever.

Who would want to live inside a clamshell, in that cold, pungent fluid, next to that pink blob of a clam? Alice. But then she thinks of her parents, how they love her and would miss her. Regretfully, she pries the shell open, swims out, and goes home. I don’t know of any writer, before Rodari, who would have explored such an experience.

There is worse, or better. In the tale called “Pulcinella’s Escape,” a Pulcinella marionette (Punch, from Punch and Judy) manages to cut the strings that attach him to his control bar. He escapes from the puppet theatre and hides in a nearby garden, where he survives by eating flowers. When winter comes, there are no more flowers, but he’s not afraid. “Oh, well,” he says, “I’ll just die here.” And he does. In the spring, a carnation grows on the spot where his body lies. Under the ground, he says to himself, “Who could be happier than me?” Here, and in “Alice Falls Into the Sea,” two realities sit side by side, looking rather surprised, but not actually annoyed, to see each other. Yes, it would be rather dark and lonely under the ground or inside a clamshell. But how peaceful!

In keeping with his leftist sympathies, there is a rich vein of utopianism in Rodari’s work. “When they are little, children must stock up on optimism,” he wrote, “for the challenge of life.” In one story, Jordan almonds rain down from a cloud in the sky. In a later tale, a Russian astronaut reports that, on Planet X213, people who don’t want to get up in the morning just grab the alarm clock and eat it and go back to sleep. Another planet, called Mun, has a machine that manufactures lies:

For one token, you could hear fourteen thousand lies. The machine contained all the lies in the world—the lies that had already been told, the lies that people were thinking of at that very moment, and all the others that would be invented in the future. Once the machine had recited all the possible lies, people were forced to always tell the truth. That’s why the planet Mun is also known as the Planet of Truth.

But there’s always a hitch. Even a young child could tell you that Mun is not a good name for a planet, nor should anyone try to eat an alarm clock. As for the rain of Jordan almonds, Rodari says that people always waited for it to come back, but it never did. The humor is not as daffy as in Edward Lear, and not as elaborate as in Lewis Carroll. (Rodari loved both writers.) “Telephone Tales” also carries a heavy load of sarcasm. In one story, a man’s nose runs away. (Rodari credits Gogol.) It is finally chased down, brought back, and reattached to the man’s face. The man remonstrates with it: “ ‘But why did you ever run away in the first place? What did I ever do to you?’ The nose glared at him . . . and said, ‘Listen, just never pick me again as long as you live.’ ” Rodari was also fond of bathroom jokes. King Midas, when his touch-of-gold magic is revoked, does not immediately revert to normal. For a brief time, everything he touches turns to shit. These narratives were probably very popular with listeners young enough to remember their toilet training, but adults, too, may have enjoyed such talk.

Some people have asked whether Rodari’s writing, so witty and strange, is not better suited to adults than to children, but children apparently love it. Rodari, before publishing his work, often tried it out on elementary-school classes, and made a note of which parts made the children laugh. I think that, like “Alice in Wonderland,” his writing makes children feel intelligent. Rodari once said that it might be best not to worry about whether his books were for children or adults, but just to consider them “books, tout court.”

It would be hard for anyone, of any age, not to love the illustrations—mostly in Magic Marker—that Enchanted Lion commissioned for “Telephone Tales,” from the Italian artist Valerio Vidali. The book design itself harbors surprises. Some pages have extra little inner pages glued to them. Others are gatefold pages, where you pull the inner edge and another page folds out. In the drawings, you are shown entire worlds of semi-abstract figures: giant noses, a palace made of ice cream, birds eating cookies, plus, of course, kings and queens and a princess in a tower. The pages are sewn with stitches worthy of a Balenciaga gown. It is astonishing that the book costs only $27.95. Go buy one, right now.

Politics accompanied Rodari all the days of his life. He first visited the Soviet Union in 1951 and went back every few years thereafter, to accept prizes, judge competitions, and, as he no doubt felt, just to do his part. Communism, in some measure, gave him his morals, without laying its heavy hand on his blithe spirit. But in the end, according to Vanessa Roghi’s biography, it let him down. He wasn’t the only one. Events in the Soviet Union—the show trials of the thirties, Khrushchev’s famous speech three years after Stalin’s death, enumerating the man’s crimes—caused leftists across the Western world to abandon their loyalty to the U.S.S.R. If those developments didn’t discourage them, later ones did: the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the quelling of the Prague Spring in 1968.

Many Western Marxists openly disavowed the Soviet system, but not Rodari. He had been a Communist practically from his teen-age years, and he would not abandon the Party now, or not publicly. He stood by it even after Italy’s so-called “years of lead,” beginning in the late sixties, when the country was shocked almost daily, it seemed, by acts of political terrorism. (An especially horrifying episode was the 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, a centrist who had served five terms as the nation’s Prime Minister, by the Red Brigades, a neo-Marxist organization. Italians who lived through those years still speak of them with emotion.) In 1979, when Rodari made his last trip to the Soviet Union, he found little to praise about the country in which he had once placed so much hope. Roghi quotes his travel diary, in which he deplores the venality of the Soviet Union and the hypocrisy of its young people. “One thing is certain,” he wrote. “They aren’t Communists.”

Rodari fans, however, should thank the U.S.S.R. By inspiring him and then disappointing him, it set him free, to work in a genre, the so-called children’s tale, where he would not have to confront his bitterness. And, in the end, it drove him beyond bitterness, into a wonderful wildness. The year before that last trip to the Soviet Union, Einaudi brought out Rodari’s final novel, a brilliant satire of both capitalists and revolutionaries. (It was published in English in 2011 with the title “Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto.”) In the book, a certain Baron Lamberto, who is ninety-three and fears that he may die, hears that the Egyptian pharaohs believed that if your name was endlessly repeated you could live forever. He decides to give it a try. He has his servants speak his name continuously into microphones placed in the attic of his castle. By the end—despite the best efforts of a gang of terrorists, who take him hostage and cut off his ear (this is actually funny)—he survives.

Rodari didn’t. Not long after “Lamberto” was published, an aneurysm was discovered in his leg. This necessitated a seven-hour operation, which seemed at first to be successful. But then, three days later, he died suddenly, of heart failure. He was only fifty-nine. I hope that his soul is at rest on the Planet of Truth. 

Published in the print edition of the December 14, 2020, issue, with the headline “A Theory of Fantasy.”

American culture is becoming more and more preoccupied with nature. What if all the celebrations of the wild world are actually manifestations of grief?

Megan Garber | The Atlantic | April 20, 2021

[>>the book]

It started, as so many of life’s journeys do, at IKEA. We went one day a few years ago to get bookshelves. We left with some Hemnes and a leafy impulse buy: a giant Dracaena fragrans. A couple of months later, delighted that we had managed to keep it alive, we brought in a spritely little ponytail palm. And then an ivy. A visiting friend brought us a gorgeous snake plant. I bought a Monstera online because it was cheap and I was curious. It arrived in perfect condition, in a big box with several warning labels: perishable: live plants.

Where is the line between “Oh, they have some plants” and “Whoa, they are plant people”? I’m not quite sure, but I am sure that we long ago crossed it. I would read the periodic news articles about Millennials and their houseplants and feel the soft shame of being seen. But I cherished our little garden. Potted plants have a quiet poetry to them, a whirl of wildness and constraint; they make the planet personal. I loved caring for ours. I loved noticing, over time, the way they stretched and flattened and curled and changed. I still do.

This year, though, as I’ve spent time a bit like a plant myself—rooted in one place, tilting toward windows—I began to wonder whether the plants had been changing me, too. Maybe tending to them, in a time of helpless loss, has been a way of making sense of grief. And maybe, too, as daily life sends ever more reminders that Earth will betray humans as readily as we have betrayed it, nurturing the seedlings has helped to assuage some of the guilt. Outside, fires raged and seas rose and viruses attacked. Inside, not knowing what else to do, I kept watering all the plants.

“Fill the earth and subdue it,” Genesis says. “Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move upon the earth.” The mandate, a burden and a bounty at once, long ago transcended religion. It infuses Americans’ habits, and our habits of mind—an element of a rhetorical regime that treats nature not as who we are, but as what we use. The distinction is there in our language, in the fact that people eat pork and beef rather than pigs and cows, and live in homes made of timber rather than trees. Even the word plant, for all its implied wildness, takes the shape of human will. “Nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man,” Aristotle announced, and centuries’ worth of humans, including many of today’s, have embraced that ancient hubris.

Little surprise, then, that much of the environmental literature of recent years has taken as its topic the fickle ecology of the human heart. Every day brings new reminders of the consequences of human exceptionalism. Every day finds American culture—its entertainment, its commercial products, its memes—coming to grips with an emergency that is as intimate as it is immense. Books, typically, are most explicit about the reckoning. Take, for example, The Nation of Plants, a polemic in the guise of a plea. Written by the Italian botany professor Stefano Mancuso and published in the U.S. in March, the book treats nation literally. Its chapters are framed as a political lecture (“Address to the United Nations General Assembly by the Representative of the Nation of Plants”)—a speech created for, and by, plant life around the world, as its representatives attempt to warn humans about the effects of our errant humanity.

Mancuso writes playfully; as manifestos go, he knows, his is deeply weird. (His brother, he notes in the book’s introduction, tried to dissuade him from the undertaking. He forged ahead anyway.) But this is peculiarity with a purpose. The conceit, an impassioned argument from collectivized flora that cites both atmospheric emissions and anthropocenic despair, forces readers to ask elemental questions. Who—and what—deserves moral consideration when the fate of one species is so often the fate of another? Mancuso’s plants, in the end, make some very good points. “We are the engine of life,” they remark. “Be conscious of that.”

The English-language publication of The Nation of Plants coincided, as it happens, with two other works that attempt to shock readers into re-seeing the world. Second Nature, from the journalist and novelist Nathaniel Rich, is a series of vignettes that examine human efforts to remake the wild. Under a White Sky is the climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s exploration of plants’ and animals’ attempts to survive on an irrevocably altered Earth. Both books offer abbreviated journeys through our post-natural world: in Rich’s, for example, a tour of Louisiana’s geoengineered coastline; and in Kolbert’s, a look at marine biologists’ desperate efforts to reconstruct dying coral reefs through “assisted evolution,” or a consideration of the hazy moralities of solar geoengineering. Mournfulness permeates these narratives. They are stories not just of loss, but also of malign neglect. They are tales of wild things subdued. “What we still, in a flourish of misplaced nostalgia, call ‘the natural world’ is gone, if ever it existed,” Rich writes. “Almost no rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has escaped our clumsy signature.”

We, when it comes to politics or culture or almost any other human event, is rarely the right term to use; in this case, though, it is the only one that works. The blame is unevenly distributed—and the people least responsible for contributing to climate change often bear the worst of its consequences—but the effects are, ultimately, communal. The Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch that has been brought about by humans, is a fact of physiography that was popularized by a chemist and that has immediate impacts on biology. It is also, however, a fact of culture. The meals we eat, the clothes we wear, the way we move around the world—these are matters, now, of life and death. Rich introduces a high-school student who, on an outing to the California coast, discovered that the sea stars she loves—Crayola-colored creatures that were plentiful in the same area just a year earlier—have disappeared. “It was like, wow,” she tells him. “Did I do something to cause this?”

The uncomfortable answer is that she did. So did you. So did I. “Eco-guilt” and, with it, “eco-grief” have risen as emotions in recent years for a reason. Rich’s book, like Kolbert’s and Mancuso’s, takes for granted that science alone won’t save us. Their stories are unofficial sequels to books with titles such as The Invention of Nature, The End of Nature, and After Nature—works that derive much of their power from the recognition that hubris, at the level of the individual, can feel a lot like helplessness. (Another entry in the genre: Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.) Humans are setting fire to our home while we are inside it. We see the flames. We hear the alarms. But we don’t move. The crisis, after all, requires us to think the unthinkable. How can home be destroyed when home is all we are?

This is the perverse paradox of the Anthropocene. Addressing the ravages of human exceptionalism will require us to use one of the gifts we have credited with making us exceptional: our great imagination. Salvation will depend on urgent new assessments of humanity’s relationship to the natural world. It will require intentional acts of culture—new vocabularies and paradigms and empathies. Until we create them, the world will keep burning. And we will stay frozen inside the fire.

The novelist William Gibson talks about “soul delay”: the tendency, in long-distance flights, of a person’s body to move more quickly than their spirit. (Jet lag, in this conception, is what happens before the soul catches up to the cells.) Nathaniel Rich, in Second Nature, applies that notion to the bleak inevitabilities of a warming planet. Earth’s future is already here, he suggests, but “our souls haven’t caught up.”

Reminders of spiritual suspension are everywhere. The other day, I pulled up a weather app on my phone and was greeted with two pieces of information: first, that the 70-degree days ahead would be preceded by potential snow flurries, and second, via the app’s integrated news-story function, that there was a “Possible Environmental Disaster Unfolding in Florida.” I didn’t click; environmental disasters, at this point, have lost their capacity to shock. Five of the six largest wildfires in California’s history blazed in 2020. So many hurricanes struck last year that we ran out of names for them.

In 1989, the writer Bill McKibben foresaw a moment when our environment would exceed the capabilities of our environmental language. We’d keep calling summer “summer,” he predicted, even though “summer” as people of the past experienced it would no longer exist. (A study published last month reported that if current conditions continue, the “summer” of 2100 could be almost six months long.) The remade Earth, McKibben further argued, would set record after record—hottest, coldest, deadliest—before people realized the need for new ways of keeping score. But inertia is an intellectual proposition as well as a physical one; for a long time, he suggested, confronted with evidence of a changing world, humans would refuse to change their mind.

McKibben made his observations in The End of Nature, and the title—not to mention the sweeping, Cassandran work itself—foreshadowed what it can feel like to be alive right now, beset by delay of the soul. Seasons, for many Americans, now refer less to matters of weather and more to matters of style (Negroni season, cuffing season, decorative-gourd season). Planet Earth and the profusion of documentaries it inspired acknowledge the extent to which the wilderness now bears the scars of human conquest. “We have changed the natural flow of more than two-thirds of the planet’s longest rivers,” David Attenborough, the troubadour of the Anthropocene, intones in Our Planet, “by, amongst other things, building dams across them.”

Here’s another line from the same documentary: “For the first time in human history, the stability of nature can no longer be taken for granted.” The admission is at once radical and banal. Anthropocene, the term, was popularized about 20 years ago; as a fact of culture, though, it is just now reaching a saturation point. Climate change, my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote last year, “is the backdrop of our lives and one of the moral crises of the century, a globe-spanning force reshaping how we work, how we play, how we shop, and how we vote.” That insight is infusing itself into American culture, not just in works of entertainment, but also in art and design. Slowly, awkwardly, we are acknowledging our grave new world.

The environmental movement of the late 20th century communicated many of its insights through a series of sweeping warnings, a collection of mights and coulds and shoulds. The new environmentalism, by contrast, sounds its alarms through acts of everyday reckoning. It tries, sometimes self-consciously and sometimes less so, to reframe the very terms of the discussion: nature not as a commodity to be exploited, but as a community to be respected. Last year, as the novel coronavirus spread, a meme poking fun at humans’ relationship with their environment became popular on social media. “Nature is healing,” the joke went, as a caption for images that purported to show wildlife reasserting itself while people were trapped indoors. The original version of the meme, however, was a bit longer: “Nature is healing,” it read. “We are the virus.”

“I’m not here to impose myself on the environment,” a contestant on the survivalist show Alone muses as he navigates an Arctic wilderness. “I’m here to be as interdependent with it as possible.” Soon after, a fellow contestant licks the sap from a birch—holding its trunk, as she does so, in a tender embrace.

Not that long ago, “tree hugger” was a common insult. Today, the hugging of trees—figuratively and occasionally literally—is a common feature of American entertainment. The 2021 films Land and Nomadland feature humans who find new ways to commune with nature. George Clooney’s character in the recent climate-disaster film The Midnight Sky is a planetary scientist. Survivalist shows have become so ubiquitous that they were spoofed by that most hallowed source of cultural criticism: the NBC sitcom The Office.

Often, the tree-hugging impulse concerns actual trees. The indie horror movie In the Earth, which premiered last week, explores what happens when the forest comes alive. The new novel American Delirium, from the Argentine writer Betina González, follows the fate of an unnamed midwestern city as it descends into dystopia. One of the features of the dissolution is a new fluidity between the urban and natural worlds: Humans act like plants, and animals act like humans. The 2018 film Annihilation is a classic tale of alien invasion, with a notable twist. The visitors attack earthbound organisms through their DNA, altering those creatures at the levels of the chromosome: invasion by way of aggressive evolution. (The film’s other twist is that the hybrid genes cause animals to become, phenotypically, plants.) The most iconic—and meme-friendly—image of Midsommar, Ari Aster’s 2019 sort-of horror film, features its protagonist being effectively consumed by a meadow’s worth of wildflowers.

“It’s hard for me to think of the big picture,” a marine biologist tells Nathaniel Rich in Second Nature. “I don’t want to think about the big picture.” No one does. But the insurgent fictions help us contend with our urgent realities. Sometimes the messaging is overt, as in epics like The Hunger Games, which take for granted that humans are at their best when they are in tune with nature. Sometimes the messaging is more figurative, as in the climate-change metaphors of the Frozen franchise or Game of Thrones. The Nation of Plants, that florid thought experiment, operates within the tradition of Erasmus Darwin’s poem “The Loves of the Plants,” Thomas Cole’s “The Lament of the Forest,” Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, and many others. What makes it such a striking example of the new naturalism, however, is its protagonists’ plea for empathy. The book is not just recentering things from the plants’ point of view; it is arguing more specifically that, for plant life just as for humans, the personal is political.

I haven’t mentioned the happening, but I should probably mention The Happening. M. Night Shyamalan’s notorious and beloved 2008 foray into eco-horror is The Nation of Plants gone murderous. The plants in this tale take revenge on the humans who have been killing them: They develop a neurotoxin that, when inhaled, causes people to kill themselves. The film engages in deliberate acts of re-seeing. It shows a swing bolted to a tree, and manages to suggest that the bolt has made not just a hole, but a wound. It shows chimneys chugging smoke into the air, imbuing the landscape with latent menace. At one point, The Happening’s camera lingers over a sign advertising a housing development: you deserve this!

The Happening is not a very good film. (To be fair, writing about a monster calling from inside the house is difficult when the monster is the house.) And so “You DESERVE this!,” The Happening’s sardonic grace note, stands out. One of the grim ironies Shyamalan is suggesting with it—that in a democracy, the people get the environment they deserve—has only gotten grimmer since 2008, as the U.S. endorsed then rejected then endorsed the bare minimums of the Paris climate pact, and as Congress repeatedly arrived at what McKibben has called “a bipartisan effort to do nothing.”

Americans are living in the exhaust of that ambivalence. Just before McKibben declared the end of nature, Don DeLillo published his classic work of environmental fiction: a novel about the casual encroachments of an “airborne toxic event.” He titled it, presciently, White Noise. DeLillo understood what it might feel like to be trapped in a noxious haze, torn between emergency and complacency. He anticipated the extreme banality of our apocalypse.

He also foresaw, insightful as he was about the particular gravities of commercial culture, another feature of the new environmentalism: the impulse to buy our way out of the crisis. You might have noticed that natural materials—or, at any rate, materials designed to evoke the natural—are the latest trend in mass-market home design. Dressers are made of rattan, tables of wicker, rugs of jute. Woven baskets are so trendy right now that they’re being used as light fixtures. The aesthetic, of course, involves houseplants. (“Blur the lines between inside and out with plants,” IKEA offers. It adds that a houseplant is “a perfect way to bring the outdoors a bit closer, and have a sense of nature invited right into your home.”)

Target calls the trend “the new naturals.” The look is the latest iteration of what might be called botanist chic: banana-leaf wallpaper, living walls, flourishes of design meant to give even the most drab rooms the humid lushness of the jungle. The style is distinct from, yet spiritually similar to, the trend so efficiently skewered by Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen in Portlandia: “Put a bird on it!” It attempts an easy absolution. It recalls the way Americans in the 1950s made sense of the space race, and the atomic bomb, by turning futurism into decor.

In Target’s ongoing scroll of home goods—items that celebrate nature and consume it at the same time—you can almost feel the old paradigms at war with the new. Design is a matter of accommodation; the “new naturals” aesthetic is home design that hints at an environmental reckoning. Many other elements of American culture do too. “Plant-based” is quickly becoming a catchall sales pitch. Fast-fashion brands are turning Zion and Yosemite into wearable goods. Gorpcore is a thing. The desire to take in wildness in this way—to commercialize nature in the guise of celebrating it—carries shades of the old Romanticism. But these sanitized sellings of nature are also intensely modern. They allow people to do versions of what I’ve been doing in my own home: pruning my plants as the world burns.

It is not a coincidence that the proliferation of “new natural” furniture has come at the same time as a proliferation of entertainment about horticulture. There’s Monty Don’s American Gardens. There are the various experts who refer to themselves as “plant doctors.” There are countless gardening TikToks. The shows take for granted the soft pleasure of tending to the needs of living things—of one species communing with another. They are complemented by an internet teeming with ad hoc advice not just about nurturing houseplants, but also about naming them. Houseplants, wild and domesticated at once, capture some of the abiding tensions of this moment. I am looking at mine as I write this. They make me feel soothed. And a little bit sad.

Paradigm shifts arise when what is known fails to accommodate what is learned. They are easy to talk about, but they can be wrenching to live through. Galileo’s observations, Darwin’s theories, Rachel Carson’s reports—these were radical ideas before they were canonical ones. Each required humans to renegotiate their relationships with the heavens, with other beings, with themselves. Those who are alive today are caught in the midst of another revolution of ideas. This one is particularly painful, though: It is founded on an insight not about how the world works, but about how it might stop working. The new paradigm is disorienting. It is terrifying. It is humbling. It demands that, on behalf of the birds of the air and the fish of the sea and all the living things that move upon the earth, we find a way, finally, to imagine the unimaginable.