Without heirs is the title of my new book, published by Marsilio, and it travels among real, presumed and controversial masters in an era that erases them.
It is a daring undertaking to speak of masters in an age that knows no heirs and does not recognize itself as the heir of anything or anyone. We are not heirs, we leave no heirs. We inherit nothing, we will leave no inheritance. This is, to put it bluntly and bluntly, the current condition. It concerns, to varying degrees and at different levels of consciousness, each of us, in our personal, public and social lives. But it spares no sphere.
We live in an age of contemporaries without ancestors or descendants, united only by their vague domicile at the same time; not spouses, at most roommates. In the history of humanity this is the first age without heirs, or at least it is the first to not recognize a legacy to be preserved and transmitted. It is the first to warn, like Louis XV, that after us will come the flood, that the world we live in will end with us. No one will continue our work, no one will save what could, should have been saved of every legacy. We will leave no traces, everything will be carried away by water and wind: the water of oblivion that erases every trace and the wind of removal that sweeps everything away. Time will not do justice, and neither will posterity: time is not a gentleman but forgetful, it flows and forgets. And posterity, at this rate, will be deprived of historical and literary memory, and of critical conscience. It is the coherent epilogue of a fatherless society, which then became a childless society, a parricidal and infanticidal society, under the banner of elective orphanhood. The society of mutants and the unborn, in the sense of declining birth rates and abortion. Nihilism ultimately keeps its promise: nothing will remain of everything, after us, nothingness.
To whom do you leave your possessions, your life, spiritual and real heritage, your library, your work, your archive of memories, objects and thoughts? To rats and incinerators. From that heritage, at most, the venal and mercantile value will be extracted, it will be quantified and sold off. If it has no commercial value, they will want to get rid of it in the quickest and most painless way, stuff for emptying cellars or for a chemical toilet. It will have to vanish without leaving a trace of itself.
Even in politics, leaders and movements present themselves as the new that advances, they carry out radical restylings that are a periodic getting rid of legacies to appear more adequate to the present and less burdened by cumbersome rubble. Other apps await us, it is not time to maintain the old ones. History in itself is an unbearable weight. Imagine tradition, which is not only memory, but also connection.
The masters, their work and their lesson are unknown. They have nothing to teach, because they come from a time behind ours, with outdated technologies and ways of thinking and seeing, for the supreme tribunal of the present. No inhabitant of the past can guide us into the future, his keys to interpretation do not open the locks of the time to come. The universal heir of knowledge is Artificial Intelligence; but it is an affective heir of the accumulated heritage: neither soul nor blood, only a warehouse of data.
To react to this amnesia, cancellation and hemorrhage, and to save what can be saved, this collection of portraits of masters was born, which follows the one hundred profiles collected in the volume Imperdonabili. For the most part they are other authors, but some unforgivable ones return, explored under different aspects. They are miniatures of essays, succinct biographies, in which there is a nuce of the author, the work and a thought about them. They are about seventy unconventional portraits, in many cases inappropriate. From Pascal to Kant, from Burke to de Maistre, from Manzoni to Baudelaire, from Verga to Proust, from Kafka to Buzzati, some great authors and others contemporary, indeed living. There is no shortage of thinkers who are against the mainstream.
The absence of heirs concerns them too, but not only them: those without heirs are first of all the classics, the greats of the past, the unforgivables I wrote about in a previous essay.
The authors discussed do not belong to the same horizon. They are different in genre, among men of letters, thinkers, journalists; their sensibilities, their statures and their outcomes are different. The thread that unites them is the intelligence of their writing, the strength of their testimony, even if unequal. Not all admirable, not all lovable. But in different ways they represent the variegated polyhedron of culture and literary civilization. They are portrayed in a heterogeneous group, in fields and times, as in the School of Athens painted by Raphael. But of them, as of every author, great and small, only one thing can be said that truly unites them in a common, adverse destiny: they no longer have heirs. A special oblivion of the masters invests Italy, which more than anyone else could nourish itself with prestigious legacies in art, language, literature, thought. Small nation, great civilization; great culture, small State; magnificent in the arts, in history and in civilization, infamous in politics, in services and in public life.
There are no teachers, not even bad ones. At most, intolerant schoolteachers and officials at the service of empty thought and blind vision. No teachers capable of teaching something and directing thought towards a perspective that is truly divergent from the status quo. If there is someone, he or she is on the margins, unnoticed, hidden, unheard of, unrecognized, borderline, or rather beyond the line. With no thought, with intellectuals dispersed, with every horizon of expectation gone, even the bad teachers end.
In their place are the influencers, the manipulators of desires, riding the wave of trends, with their power of suggestion and emulation, between fashions and consumption; the advertising agents, who convey and direct the desire for goods using prescribed models and taboos; the top models of the star system, the communication entrepreneurs who do not teach but seduce and conform, acting on language, on the global imagination and on mass individual narcissism.
However, we do not give up and we repeat with the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer: "If my time wants to oppose me, I let it do so calmly. I came from other times and I hope to go to other times." Despite everything, we will continue to feel like heirs of authors and traditions and to honor our masters, our fathers, our older brothers. And, if we are alone, it means that we will be in the company of the gods, the absent, the invisible.
The Truth – November 5, 2024