The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Finding Sanity in Sprezzatura: The Lost 16th-century Italian Art of Living with Fluency, Serenity, and Openness to Wonder

By Maria Popova

Finding Sanity in Sprezzatura: The Lost 16th-century Italian Art of Living with Fluency, Serenity, and Openness to Wonder

Language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great danger is that we come to mistake the shape for the substance, reducing concepts and experiences we cannot name or contain to the words tasked with holding the spill of the ineffable. (This is what makes The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows so miraculous.) The more complex and tessellated the concept, the emotion, the experience, the more deficient the word for it and the more urgent the yearning to speak it with the tongue of the mind, to give it shape in sound and meaning in metaphor.

Over and over, we have struggled to name that quality of being, that state of mind, that orientation of the spirit which “the good life” asks of us. Edith Wharton called its rudiment “an unassailable serenity.” Bertrand Russell called it “a largeness of contemplation.” Iris Murdoch termed it, simply and perfectly, “unselfing.”

In one of the marvelous essays in her posthumous collection The Unforgivable (public library), Italian writer Cristina Campo (April 29, 1923–January 10, 1977) offers the 16th-century Italian term sprezzatura for that ineffable quality of being upon which our deepest emotional, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic longings tremble.

Art by Margaret C. Cook

With an eye to the various definitions of the word, “all very beautiful and very imprecise” — among them “frankness, fluency, the opposite of mannerism or affectation,” “service to beauty,” and “a casual manner of speech or action… typical of a self-assured master” — Campo considers the reductionism of a descriptive definition:

Sprezzatura is in reality a whole moral attitude that, like the word itself, requires a context that is almost gone from the contemporary world, and, like the word itself, is at risk of disappearing. Or rather, since nothing that’s real ever disappears, it is at risk of languishing in those oubliettes where, in savage and more honest times, they used to chain up princes who’d provoked the ire of the people until their very names were forgotten.

[…]

Sprezzatura is a moral rhythm, it is the music of an interior grace; it is the tempo, I would like to say, in which the perfect freedom of any given destiny is made manifest, although it is always delineated by a secret ascesis. Two lines hide it, like a ring in a case: “With a light heart, with light hands, / to take life, to leave life.”

Illustration by Italian artist Mimmo Paladino

We might find sprezzatura, Campo observes, in the lives of the Trappist monks, in the “ferocious geometry behind the Dance of the Dragonflies,” in “the études of Frédéric Chopin, by which tenderness and turbulence, rubati and turbati, ecstasy itself and piercing premonition were mercilessly measured,” and in fairy tales, of course. Across its different manifestations, she considers its defining orientation of the spirit:

Above all else, sprezzatura is in fact an alert and amiable imperviousness to the violence and baseness of others, an impassive acceptance — which to unperceiving eyes may look like callousness — of unchangeable situations that it tranquilly “decrees nonexistent” (and in so doing ineffably modifies). But beware. Sprezzatura is not kept alive or passed on for very long if it isn’t founded, like religious vows, on an almost total detachment from earthly goods, a constant readiness to give them up if one happens to possess them, an evident indifference to death, a profound reverence for what is higher than oneself and for the impalpable, courageous, inexpressibly precious forms that are its emblems here below. Beauty (interior before becoming visible) above all, the generosity of spirit at its root, and a joyful way of being in the world. This means, among other things, the ability to fly in the face of criticism with smiling good grace and a dignified eloquence born of total forgetfulness of self… an immense, unceasing invitation to the interior liberation that is utter forgetfulness of self — of the ego magnetized by the sideways mirrors of psychology and the social — stripping off what hinders and deceives the spirit in order to acquire the light step and radiant rhythm that disburses the happiness of the saints… “With a light heart, with light hands…” A pure life is given its rhythm by this light and vehement music, composed entirely of forgetfulness and solicitude.

This “ineffable rhythm,” she writes, is found in “the elegance of the living flame,” in “the crash of interstellar silences,” in encounters with “supernatural beauty,” “where living and leaving are an ecstasy, one and the same.”

Couple with Campo on fairy tales as a lens on the paradox of knowing who you are and what you want, then revisit Marie Howe’s poem “The Maples,” which offers its own spare, splendid answer to the abiding question of how we should live our lives.

BP

Trauma, Transformation, and the Courage of Uncertainty: Prentis Hemphill on the Key to Breaking Our Patterns

By Maria Popova

Trauma, Transformation, and the Courage of Uncertainty: Prentis Hemphill on the Key to Breaking Our Patterns

“There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it,” Adam Philips writes in his superb meditation on our ambivalent desire for change — ambivalence brilliantly rendered in the Vampire Problem thought experiment, illustrating the paradoxical psychology of why have such a hard time changing, breaking the patterned ways of being by which we hedge against the fear of not knowing who we are, what we want, and how to be safe.

Our paradox is that we are the pattern-seeking animal — a kind of superpower conferred upon us by our complex consciousness — but we are always paying the price of consciousness: Like the hero of the Greek myths always bedeviled by his tragic flaw, we pay for our power with our vulnerability. The patterns we discover — fractals, the harmonic scale, the laws of planetary motion — give us a firmer foothold on reality, set us free to know the world as it really is, in all its fearsome unknowns. But the patterns we invent — in our habits, in our relationships, in our myths and power structures and organizing principles of civilization — cage us, stiffen us with certainty until we grow too ossified to change.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.

In a world doing its best to make us mistake being sure for being safe, living with the courage of uncertainty — the courage to break the pattern of the familiar in order to release the possible — is a radical act, an act not only of resistance but of redemption. The building blocks and practice of that courage, as an antipode to the reflex of fear, are what therapist, teacher, and organizer Prentis Hemphill reflects on in the inaugural episode of trauma therapist Mariah Rooney’s wonderful MOVD podcast:

The fear is absolutely there, and the fear is often the driver toward isolation, toward my old patterning, toward the thing I think will keep me comfortable and alleviate the fear. But what changes our patterns, ultimately, is the courage to feel that fear and do something different anyway. You step into the unknown and you don’t know what is going to happen — that is the act of courage.

This reorientation is not merely a cerebral decision but an embodied action — something that renders the courage to change, or simply the courage to get real, all the more difficult and all the more urgent in a neo-Cartesian culture that keep driving us further and further away from the lush life of the body as disembodied artificial intelligences make more and more decisions for us and the real world — the world of fireflies and owls and lichen, trembling with aliveness — takes up less and less space in our mental model of reality. Hemphill celebrates this necessary reclamation of the body as the instrument of transformation:

Everything that we do towards recovering aspects of ourselves that we have disowned or parts of our body that we have vacated, every act that we take where we work through and with the fear rather than succumb to the isolation that fear recommends — those are the moments where we start to change our patterning.

Art by Charlie Mackesy from The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

In What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World (public library), Hemphill considers the psychophysiology that makes fear such a powerful default:

When what we face overwhelms our ability to respond and/or to escape unscathed, or when we are given the message to suppress the body’s reactions, our nervous systems don’t know that the traumatic experience has ended, and our survival response continues to exist in our bodies. We live then in a near-constant state of reaction, either scanning for an indication that the threat has returned or reproducing aspects of the experience in our relationships and lives in what many understand to be an attempt to complete the threat we feel. It is alive in our tissues, our muscles, our thoughts, and our moods. It lives on in our behavioral patterns, our habits, what we do and don’t do, what we say and what we are afraid to say… You can have a region of your body living out of time, out of step, with the rest of you… A physiological memory from ten or twenty years earlier can be lodged in the structure of your fasciae, and therefore in your actions and relationships… Trauma stays… lingers long past its welcome in our bodies.

Against this backdrop, courage may just be the refusal to partition ourselves, to vacate our embodiment or cede it to our ideas about what life should look like, ideas programmed by our unexamined and uncontested defaults. Insisting that “every inch of progress, every ounce of love, every truly meaningful action from here on out will happen through courage, not comfort,” Hemphill writes:

Courage changes things and courage changes us. It’s how we become. I have found that there is a “right-sized” fear inside any vision for change, and in taking courageous action we develop a part of ourselves that can talk back to and hold the fear without letting it lead… The courage we need is the courage to fail and stay… The courage to exit the safety of our dying delusions… The courage to surrender… The courage to love and be loved.

Complement with George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty and how to unbreak our hearts by breaking our patterns, then revisit Charlie Mackesy’s wondrous watercolor meditation on how to bear your fear and what it means to love.

BP

The Other Significant Others: Living and Loving Outside the Confines of Conventional Friendship and Compulsory Coupledom

By Maria Popova

The Other Significant Others: Living and Loving Outside the Confines of Conventional Friendship and Compulsory Coupledom

We move through the world largely unaware that our emotions are made of concepts — the brain’s coping mechanism for the blooming buzzing confusion of what we are. We label, we classify, we contain — that is how we parse the maelstrom of experience into meaning. It is a useful impulse — without it, there would be no science or storytelling, no taxonomies and theorems, no poems and plots. It is also a limiting one — the most beautiful, rewarding, and transformative experiences in life transcend the categories our culture has created to contain the chaos of consciousness, nowhere more so than in the realm of relationships — those mysterious benedictions that bridge the abyss between one consciousness and another.

When we hollow the word friend by overuse and misuse, when we make of love a contract with prescribed roles and rigid, impossible expectations, we become prisoners of our own concepts. The history of feeling is the history of labels too small to contain the loves of which we are capable — varied and vigorously transfigured from one kind into another and back again. It takes both great courage and great vulnerability to live outside concepts, to meet each new experience, each new relationship, each new emotional landscape on its own terms and let it in turn expand the terms of living.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

That is what Rhaina Cohen explores in The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center (public library) — a journalistic investigation of the vast yet invisible world of unclassifiable intimate relationships, profiling pairs of people across various circumstances and stages of life sustained by such bonds, people who have “redrawn the borders of friendship, moving the lines further and further outward to encompass more space in each other’s lives,” people who have found themselves in finding each other.

What emerges through this portrait of a type of relationship “hidden in plain sight” is an antidote to the tyranny of the “one-stop-shop coupledom ideal” and “an invitation to expand what options are open to us,” radiating a reminder that we pay a price for living by our culture’s standard concepts:

While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.

A generation after Andrew Sullivan celebrated the rewards of friendship in a culture obsessed with romance, Cohen writes:

This is a book about friends who have become a we, despite having no scripts, no ceremonies, and precious few models to guide them toward long-term platonic commitment. These are friends who have moved together across states and continents. They’ve been their friend’s primary caregiver through organ transplants and chemotherapy. They’re co-parents, co-homeowners, and executors of each other’s wills. They belong to a club that has no name or membership form, often unaware that there are others like them. They fall under the umbrella of what Eli Finkel, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, calls “other significant others.” Having eschewed a more typical life setup, these friends confront hazards and make discoveries they wouldn’t have otherwise.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from a vintage ode to friendship by Janice May Udry

Noting that her interest in the subject is more than theoretical, catalyzed by her own expansive relationship with another woman in parallel with her marriage, Cohen considers these category-defying bonds as a countercultural act of courage and resistance:

I began to see how these unusual relationships can also be a provocation — unsettling the set of societal tenets that circumscribe our intimate lives: That the central and most important person in one’s life should be a romantic partner, and friends are the supporting cast. That romantic love is the real thing, and if people claim they feel strong platonic love, it must not really be platonic. That adults who raise kids together should be having sex with each other, and marriage deserves special treatment by the state.

With an eye to the long lineage of people who have defied the categories of their time and place — the kinds of people populating Figuring, which I wrote largely to explore such relationships — she adds:

Challenging these social norms is not new, nor are platonic partners the only dissidents. People who are feminists, queer, trans, of color, nonmonogamous, single, asexual, aromantic, celibate, or who live communally have been questioning these ideas for decades, if not centuries. All have offered counterpoints to what Eleanor Wilkinson, a professor at the University of Southampton, calls compulsory coupledom: the notion that a long-term monogamous romantic relationship is necessary for a normal, successful adulthood. This is a riff on the feminist writer Adrienne Rich’s influential concept of “compulsory heterosexuality” — the idea, enforced through social pressure and practical incentives, that the only normal and acceptable romantic relationship is between a man and a woman. Some of the first stories we hear as children instill compulsory coupledom, equating characters finding their “one true love” with living “happily ever after.”

[…]

It can be confusing to live in the gulf between the life you have and the life you believe you’re supposed to be living.

In the remainder of The Other Significant Others, Cohen relays the stories of people who have sliced through the confusion to build lives that serve them through tailor-made relationships that reward the deepest and truest parts of them, relationships that reimagine what it means to love and be loved, to see and be seen — relationships like those of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller.

Complement it with poet and philosopher David Whyte on love and resisting the tyranny of relationship labels, then revisit Coleridge on the paradox of friendship and romantic love.

BP

An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of Candid Connection

By Maria Popova

Friendship is the sunshine of life — the quiet radiance that makes our lives not only livable but worth living. (This is why we must use the utmost care in how we wield the word friend.) In my own life, friendship has been the lifeline for my darkest hours of despair, the magnifying lens for my brightest joys, the quiet pulse-beat beneath the daily task of living. You can glean a great deal about a person from the constellation of friends around the gravitational pull of their personhood. “Whatever our degree of friends may be, we come more under their influence than we are aware,” the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell observed as she contemplated how we co-create each other and recreate ourselves in friendship. Her friend Ralph Waldo Emerson — whom she taught to look through a telescope — believed that all true friendship rests on two pillars. In his own life, he put the theory into practice in his friendship with his young protégé Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) — a solitary and achingly introverted person himself, who thought deeply and passionately about the rewards and challenges of friendship.

Henry David Thoreau (Daguerreotype by Benjamin D. Maxham, 1856)

Like all unusual people, Thoreau had a hard time connecting. In a desponded diary entry from his mid-thirties, found in The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837–1861 (public library), he writes:

Why should I speak to my friends? for how rarely is it that I am I; and are they, then, they? We will meet, then, far away.

Several months later, just before the Christmas holidays with their cruel magnifying lens of loneliness for the lonely, he rues his inability to connect openheartedly:

My difficulties with my friends are such as no frankness will settle. There is no precept in the New Testament that will assist me. My nature, it may be, is secret. Others can confess and explain; I cannot.

Thoreau finds himself pocked with self-doubt about his ability to connect, his sense of isolation at times swelling into punitive despair:

Nothing makes me so dejected as to have met my friends, for they make me doubt if it is possible to have any friends. I feel what a fool I am.

Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up by John Miller

Over and over, Thoreau anguishes with the extreme shyness and reticence of his nature, longs for a confidante beyond the diary page, longs for companionship beyond the birds and the trees. On a beautiful spring Sunday, he despairs:

I have got to that pass with my friend that our words do not pass with each other for what they are worth. We speak in vain; there is none to hear. He finds fault with me that I walk alone, when I pine for want of a companion; that I commit my thoughts to a diary even on my walks, instead of seeking to share them generously with a friend; curses my practice even. Awful as it is to contemplate, I pray that, if I am the cold intellectual skeptic whom he rebukes, his curse may take effect, and wither and dry up those sources of my life, and my journal no longer yield me pleasure nor life.

Months after publishing Walden, with its lyrical celebration of solitude, his loneliness deepens into a primal scream of longing for connection:

What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers? I walk alone. My heart is full. Feelings impede the current of my thoughts. I knock on the earth for my friend. I expect to meet him at every turn; but no friend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me.

And yet this openhearted longing is itself the only real raw material of friendship — only by surrendering to it, with all the vulnerability this demands of us, do we become receptive to the longing of others, the mutual yearning for connection that is shared heartbeat of humanity. Thoreau quietly intuits this equivalence, so that when he does connect, when he does feel the warm glow of friendship envelop him, it is nothing less than an exultation:

Ah, my friends, I know you better than you think, and love you better, too.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from a vintage ode to friendship by Janice May Udry

At only twenty-four, Thoreau had arrived at a foundational fact of living — his own grand unified theory of human connection, which he spent the remainder of his short life trying, often with touching difficulty, to put into practice:

Friends are those twain who feel their interests to be one. Each knows that the other might as well have said what he said. All beauty, all music, all delight springs from apparent dualism but real unity. My friend is my real brother.

Pulsating beneath all of his uneasy reckonings is a deep-thinking, deep-feeling recognition of the essence of friendship:

The field where friends have met is consecrated forever. Man seeks friendship out of the desire to realize a home here… The friend is like wax in the rays that fall from our own hearts. My friend does not take my word for anything, but he takes me. He trusts me as I trust myself. We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

Complement these fragments from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau — a biblical kind of book, replete with his deep-souled wisdom on how to see more clearly, the myth of productivity, the greatest gift of growing old, the sacredness of public libraries, the creative benefits of keeping a diary, and the only worthwhile definition of success — with Seneca on true and false friendship, Kahlil Gibran on the building blocks of meaningful connection, Henry Miller on the relationship between creativity and community, Lewis Thomas on the poetic science of why we are wired for connection, and this lovely vintage illustrated ode to friendship.

BP

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