NOTEBOOKS
This book was conceived, then written, in whole or in part, in various forms, between 1924 and 1929, between my twenties and twenty-five years. Those manuscripts have all been destroyed. They deserved to be.
Found in a volume of Flaubert’s correspondence, much read, much emphasized around 1927, the unforgettable sentence: “When the gods were gone and Christ not yet, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, there was a unique moment in where man has existed, alone “. I would have spent a large part of my life trying to define, and then describe, this man alone and, on the other hand, tied to everything.
Work resumed in 1934. Long investigations. About fifteen pages were written, considered definitive. Project resumed and abandoned several times between 1934 and 1937.
For a long time, I imagined the work in the form of a series of dialogues, in which all the voices of the time would be heard. But whatever I did, the particular prevailed over the whole, the parts compromised the balance of the whole. Under all those cries, Adriano’s voice was lost. I couldn’t bring that world to life as he had seen and understood a man.
The only sentence left from the 1934 draft: “I begin to see the profile of my death.” Like a painter placing himself in front of a horizon and relentlessly moving the easel to the right, then to the left, I had finally found the point of view of the book.
Take a known, complete, defined existence – as far as they can ever be – from History, in order to embrace its entire trajectory with a single glance; indeed, better, to grasp the moment in which the man who has lived this existence weighs it, examines it, and, for an instant, is able to judge it; to make him face his life in the same position as us.
Mornings at Villa Adriana; countless evenings spent in the small cafes around the Olympieion; incessant comings and goings on the seas of Greece; roads of Asia Minor. To be able to use these memories, which are mine, they had to be as far away from me as the second century.
to G.F.
Experiments with time: 18 days, 18 months, 18 years, 18 centuries. Motionless survival of the statues which, like the head of the Antinous Mondragone in the Louvre, still live within that time that no longer exists. The same problem considered in terms of human generations: two dozen skeletal hands, more or less twenty-five old men would be enough to establish uninterrupted contact between Hadrian and us.
In 1937, during a first stay in the United States, I did some reading for this book in the Yale University Library. I wrote the visit to the doctor and the passage on the renunciation of physical exercises: fragments that exist, reworked, in the current edition.
Anyway, I was too young. There are books that should not be dared until after the age of forty. Before this age, there is a risk of underestimating the existence of the great natural frontiers that separate, from person to person, from century to century, the infinite variety of beings or, on the contrary, of attributing excessive importance to simple administrative divisions. , at the customs offices, at the sentries of armed sentries. It took me these years to calculate exactly the distance between the emperor and me.
I suspend the work of this book, except for a few days in Paris, between 1937 and 1939.
The memory of T. E. Lawrence traces that of Hadrian in Asia Minor; but Hadrian’s background is not the desert. They are the hills of Athens. The more I thought about it, the more the story of a man who refuses (and, first of all, refuses) encouraged me to present through Adriano the point of view of the man who does not renounce or who renounces here to accept elsewhere. It goes without saying, moreover, that in this case asceticism and hedonism are interchangeable on many points.
In 1939, the manuscript was left in Europe with most of the notes. However, I took with me to the United States the summaries made years earlier at Yale, a map of the Roman Empire at the death of Trajan that I had been carrying with me for years and the profile of the Antinous from the Archaeological Museum of Florence, which I had bought there in 1926: a young, serious, sweet profile.
Abandoned the project from 1939 to 1948; I thought about it at times, but with discouragement, almost with indifference, as if about the impossible; and I felt a little ashamed of having been able to attempt such an undertaking.
I sink into the desperation of the writer who does not write.
In the worst moments of discouragement and atony, I would go to see a Roman canvas by Canaletto in the beautiful Hartford Museum in Connecticut, the brown and golden Pantheon against the blue sky of a late summer afternoon. I returned home each time calm, warmed up.
In 1941, I accidentally discovered four Piranesi prints that G. and I bought in a paint shop in New York. One of them, a view of Villa Adriana that I did not know, represents the chapel of the Canopus where in the seventeenth century the Antinous in Egyptian style were extracted and the statues of the priestesses in basalt that can be seen today in the Vatican: a circular structure, exploded as a skull; brambles like locks of hair hang from it in disorder. The almost mediumistic genius of Piranesi smelled the hallucination, the long paths that memory traces, the tragic architecture of the inner world. For years and years I have looked at that image almost every day, without devoting a thought to the work begun in other times. I thought I had given up on it. Such are the curious twists and turns of what they call oblivion.
In the spring of ’47, rearranging papers, I burned the notes I had made at Yale. By now, they seemed definitively useless.
Yet, Hadrian’s name appears in an essay on the myth of Greece that I wrote in 1943 and published Caillois in Buenos Ayres’s “Les Lettres Françaises”. In 1945, the image of Antinous drowned, almost as if he were carried on this current of oblivion, rises to the surface, in a still unpublished essay “Cantico dell’Anima Libera”, which I wrote on the eve of a serious illness.
To repeat relentlessly that everything I am telling here is distorted by what I am not telling; these notes surround only a gap. There is no mention of what I was doing in those difficult years, of thoughts, work, anxieties, joys, nor of the immense repercussions of external events and of the perennial proof of oneself as a touchstone of facts. I also pass in silence the experiences of the disease and other more secret ones that they bring with them; and the perpetual presence or search for love.
It does not matter. Perhaps that solution of continuity, that fracture, that night of the soul that so many of us felt, each in our own way, in those years, and often in a much more tragic and definitive way than me, was needed to force me to try to fill not only the distance that separated me from Adriano, but above all the distance that separated me from myself.
Usefulness of what one does for oneself, without any thought of profit; during those years of estrangement, I had continued to read the ancient authors: the volumes of the Loeb-Heinemann edition, with their red and green covers, had become a homeland for me.
One of the best ways to revive a man’s thinking: to rebuild his library. For years, without knowing it, I had been working to repopulate the shelves of Tivoli. I just had to imagine the swollen hands of a sick man as he unrolls the manuscript scrolls.
To remake from the inside what the archaeologists of the nineteenth century did from the outside.
In December 1948, I received from Switzerland – where I had deposited it during the war – a suitcase full of family papers and letters from ten years earlier.
I sat by the fire to deal with that horrible sort of post mortem inventory. So I spent several evenings all alone. I opened parcels of letters before destroying them, I scrolled through that pile of correspondence with forgotten people who had forgotten me; some were still alive, others were dead. Some of those sheets bore the date of the generation preceding mine; even the names no longer meant anything to me.
I mechanically threw into the fire that exchange of dead thoughts with the Marys, the Franceschi, the disappeared Paoli.
I opened four or five typewritten sheets; the paper was yellowed. I read the heading: “My dear Marco …” What friend, what lover, what distant relative was it? I didn’t remember that name.
It took me a few moments for it to come back to my mind that Marco stood for Marcus Aurelius and that I had a fragment of the lost manuscript before my eyes.
From that moment on, for me it was nothing more than writing this book, whatever the cost.
That night, I reopened two volumes, among those that had also been returned to me; fragments of a dispersed library: Dio Cassius in the fine print by Henri Estienne and a volume of a common edition of the “Historia Augusta”; the two main sources of Hadrian’s life.
I had bought them around the time I set out to write this book.
Everything that the world and I had gone through in the interval enriched those chronicles of a distant time, projected other lights, other shadows on that imperial existence; at that time, I had thought above all of the man of letters, of the traveler, of the poet, of the lover. None of these traits erased. But for the first time I could see the most official, at the same time, the most secret, that of the emperor, taking shape with extreme clarity, among all those figures.
Living in a decaying world made me realize the importance of Princeps.
I enjoyed making and remaking this portrait of an almost wise man.
Only one other historical figure tempted me with almost equal insistence: Omar Khayyam, poet astronomer; but the life of Khayyam is that of the contemplator and the pure scorner; the world of action is too foreign to him. And on the other hand I have never visited Persia and I don’t know the language.
It is also impossible to take a female character as a central figure; for example, placing Plotina as the axis of the story, instead of Adriano. Women’s lives are too small or too secret. If a woman talks about herself, the first reproach she will make is that she is no longer a woman. It is hard enough to get a man to speak some truth.
I left for Taos, New Mexico. I carried with me the blank pages on which to start the book again, like a swimmer who throws himself into the water without knowing if he will reach the opposite shore.
I worked late at night between New York and Chicago, locked in the sleeping car cabin as if in a hypogeum. Then, all the following day, in the restaurant of a Chicago station, where I waited for a train blocked by a snowstorm; and then again, until dawn, alone in the Santa Fé Express car: all around, the black bumps of the Colorado mountains and the eternal pattern of the stars.
The passages on food, love, sleep and knowledge of man I threw them down like this, in one go. I have no memory of a more fervent day, of brighter nights.
I pass as quickly as possible on three years of research, which interest only specialists, and on the elaboration of a method of delirium which can only interest the insane. Besides, this last word smacks too much of romanticism; we speak rather of a constant participation, as clairvoyant as possible, in what was.
One foot in learning, the other in magic; or more exactly, and without metaphor, in that “sympathetic magic” which consists in moving oneself with the thought into the interiority of another.
Portrait of a voice. If I wanted to write these memoirs of Adriano in first person, it is to do without any intermediary as much as possible, including myself. Adriano was able to talk about his life in a more firm, subtler way than I would have been able to.
Those who place the historical novel in a separate category forget that the novelist limits himself to interpreting, using procedures of his time, a certain number of past events, memories, conscious or not, personal or not, which are woven of the same material. of history. “War and Peace”, all of Proust’s work, what are they but the reconstruction of a lost past? The historical novel of the nineteenth century borders on melodrama and the tale of swashbuckling, it is true; but no more than the sublime “Duchesse de Langeais” and the extraordinary “Fille aux yeux d’or”. In meticulously reconstructing Amilcare’s palace, Flaubert uses hundreds of minute details and proceeds with the same method for Yonville. In our times, the historical novel, or what for convenience we want to call that, can only be immersed in a rediscovered time: the taking possession of an inner world.
Time has nothing to do with it. I have always been surprised that my contemporaries, convinced that they have conquered and transformed space, are unaware that the distance between the centuries can be narrowed at will.
Everything escapes us. Everyone. Even ourselves. I know my father’s life less than Adriano’s. My own existence, if I had to tell it in writing, I would reconstruct it from the outside, with difficulty, as if it were that of someone else. I should go in search of letters, of memories of other people, to stop my vague memories. They are always collapsed walls, shaded areas.
Make sure that the gaps in our texts, as far as Adriano’s life is concerned, coincide with what could have been his own forgetfulness.
This does not mean at all, as it is too often said, that historical truth is always and totally elusive; it happens of historical truth neither more nor less like all the others: we are mistaken, MORE OR LESS.
The rules of the game: learn everything, read everything, get informed about everything and, at the same time, apply the exercises of Ignatius of Loyola or the method of the Hindu ascetic, who takes years and years to focus more on precision the image he created under closed eyelids.
Through thousands of cards, to pursue the actuality of the facts, to try to give those marble faces their mobility, the agility of the living thing. When two texts, two statements, two ideas are opposed, have fun reconciling them rather than canceling them one through the other; to recognize in them two aspects, two successive stages of the same fact, a convincing reality precisely because it is complex, human because it is multiple.
Striving to read a second century text with second century eyes, soul, senses; immerse it in that mother water which are contemporary facts; to eliminate as long as possible all the ideas, the feelings that have accumulated, layer by layer, between those beings and us; and, at the same time, to use prudently, or only by way of preparatory studies, the possibility of approaching and cutting out new perspectives, developed little by little through so many centuries and so many events that separate us from that text, from that event, from that character. To use them, in a certain way, as so many stages on the way back towards a particular point in time; to force oneself to ignore the shadows that have subsequently been cast on it, not to allow the surface of the mirror to be clouded by the vapor of a breath, to take as a point of contact with those men only what is most lasting, most essential in us, both in the emotions of the senses and in the operations of the spirit: they too, like us, munched olives, drank wine, smeared their fingers with honey, fought against the biting wind, against the blinding rain, the summer sought the shadow of a plane tree, they rejoiced, they thought, they grew old, they died.
I have submitted the short passages of the chronicles concerning Hadrian’s illness to doctors several times for a diagnosis: after all, they do not differ much from the clinical descriptions of Balzac’s death.
To understand more, I used an incipient heartache.
Who is Hecuba for him? Hamlet asks himself in front of the boy crying over Hecuba. And behold, Hamlet was forced to recognize that that comedian who sheds real tears was able to establish with that woman who had been dead for three millennia a deeper contact than himself with his father, buried the day before; he does not suffer enough from her death to be able to avenge him without delay.
The substance, the structure of the human being does not change: there is nothing more stable than the curve of an ankle, the place of a tendon, the shape of a big toe. But there are times when footwear deforms less: in the century I am talking about we are still very close to the free truth of the bare foot.
When I had Adriano formulate his predictions about the future, I kept myself in the field of the plausible; provided, however, that those predictions remained vague. Whoever analyzes human affairs without partiality is generally not very mistaken about the future course of events; but he makes mistakes after mistakes when it comes to predicting how the details, the deviations, will unfold: Napoleon at Sant’Elena announced that a century after his death Europe would be either revolutionary or Cossack; he posed the two terms of the problem very precisely, but he could not imagine that they would overlap one another.
Generally, he refuses to see the features of future epochs under the present, out of pride, vulgar ignorance, cowardice. Free spirits – the sages of the ancient world – thought in terms of physics or physiology, as we do; they took into consideration the possibility of the disappearance of man, the death of the earth. Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius were not at all unaware that the gods and civilizations pass away, die; we are not alone in facing an inexorable future.
The clairvoyance that I attributed to Adriano was, on the other hand, only a way of highlighting the almost Faustian element of the character, as transpired, for example, in the Sibillini songs, in the writings of Elio Aristide and in the portrait of Adriano old traced. from Frontone. Rightly or wrongly, when he was close to dying he was given more than human qualities.
If this man had not preserved world peace and renewed the economy of the empire, his joys and misfortunes would interest me less.
There is never enough dedication to that exciting game that consists in juxtaposing the texts: the poem of Tespie’s Hunting Trophy, which Hadrian consecrated to Love and Venus Urania “on the hills of Helicon, on the banks of the source of Narcissus »Is from autumn 124; in the same period, the emperor passed by Mantinea and Pausanias informs us that he had the tomb of Epaminondas restored and had a poem of him engraved on it.
The Mantinea inscription is lost; but Hadrian’s gesture perhaps does not acquire all its value if we do not compare it with a passage from Plutarch’s “Moralia”, which tells us that Epaminondas was buried in that place between two young men, killed in the
side of him. If the date (123-24) of the stay in Asia is accepted because it is from every point of view the most plausible, and confirmed by the iconographic findings, for the meeting of the emperor with Antinous, those two poems would be part of what is he could call “the cycle of Antinous,” both inspired by that same loving and heroic Greece that Arrian later evoked, after the death of his favorite, when he compared the boy to Patroclus.
Of some figures, we would like to develop the portrait: Plotina, Sabina, Arriano, Suetonius. But Adriano could only see them from a glimpse; Antinous himself can be seen only by refraction, through the memories of the Emperor, that is to say with passionate minutia; and some errors.
Of Antinous’s temperament, all that can be said is inscribed in the smallest of his images. “Eager and impassionated tenderness, sullen effeminacy”: with the admirable candor of poets, Shelley says the essential in six words, where art critics and historians of the nineteenth century, for the most part, have not been able to do anything but spread in virtuous declamations or idealizing, getting lost in the false and the vague.
Portraits of Antinous: there are many. They range from the incomparable to the mediocre. Despite the variations due to the sculptor’s art or the age of the model, the difference between the portraits taken from life and those painted in honor of the deceased, they are all shocking for the incredible realism of the figure, always recognizable at first glance and yet interpreted in many ways, for this unique example in antiquity, of survival, of multiplication in the stone of a face that was not that of a statesman or a philosopher, but that was simply loved.
Among all these images, the most beautiful are two, the least known and the only ones that reveal the name of a sculptor: one is the bas-relief signed by Antoniano di Afrodisia, which was found about fifty years ago in a land belonging to an institute. agronomic, «I Fondi Rustici», and is currently located in the boardroom. Since no Rome guidebook reports its existence and the city is packed with statues, tourists ignore it. Antoniano’s work was carved in an Italian marble and therefore was certainly performed in Italy, without any doubt in Rome by this artist. Perhaps he had settled in Rome or Adriano had brought him with him on one of his travels.
The sculpture is of extreme finesse: the leaves of a vine frame that young, sadly bent face with tender arabesques; one cannot help but think of the vintages of a short life, the opulent atmosphere of an autumn evening.
The work bears the traces of the years spent in a cellar during the last war: the whiteness of the marble has momentarily disappeared under the patches of earth; three fingers of his left hand were broken. Thus the gods suffer for the folly of men.
[The lines above were first published six years ago; meanwhile, Antoniano’s bas-relief was bought by a Roman banker, Arturo Osio, a singular character who would have interested Stendhal or Balzac. Osio pours out on this beautiful object the same concern that he has for the animals he keeps free in a property a stone’s throw from Rome, and for the trees that he has planted by the thousands on the Orbetello estate. A rare virtue: “The Italians hate trees”; Stendhal already said it in 1828: what would he say today, when speculators kill by dint of hot water injections the umbrella pines that are too beautiful, too protected by urban planning regulations, which disturb them to build their anthills? And also a rare luxury: how many rich people animate their woods, their prairies with animals in the wild, not for the pleasure of hunting, but to reconstitute a kind of wonderful Eden? the love of ancient statues, these large peaceful, durable and, at the same time, fragile objects, is also very rare among collectors in this troubled and future-less age. Under the advice of experts, the new owner of Antoniano’s bas-relief subjected it to a delicate cleaning by a skilled hand. A slow and light friction made with the fingertips freed the marble from rust, from mold stains and gave the stone its tenuous sheen of alabaster and ivory].
The second of these masterpieces is the illustrious sardonic which bears the name of Gemma Marlborough, because she belonged to that collection which is now dispersed. This splendid engraved stone appeared to have been lost or returned to the earth for more than thirty years; a public sale in London brought it to light in 1952; the enlightened taste of a great collector, Giorgio Sangiorgi, brought her back to Rome: I owe to his benevolence for having seen and touched this unique piece; on the edge there is an incomplete signature; it is undoubtedly believed to be that of Antonian of Aphrodisias. The artist has enclosed that perfect profile in the limited space of the sardonyx with such skill that this stone fragment remains the testimony of a great lost art in the same way as a statue or a bas-relief. The proportions of the work make you forget the size of the object; in the Byzantine era, the reverse of this masterpiece was immersed in a fusion of pure gold. He thus passed from an unknown collector to another until his presence in Venice is reported, in an important collection of the seventeenth century; the famous antiquarian Gavin Hamilton bought it and brought it to England, from where today it has returned to its starting point, which was Rome. Of all the objects still existing on the face of the earth, this is the only one which can be assumed with any basis that Adriano held it in his hands.
We must immerse ourselves in the intricacies of a subject to discover the simplest things and the most general literary interest. Studying the character of Flegone, Hadrian’s secretary, I discovered that this forgotten figure is responsible for the first – and one of the most beautiful – ghost stories, that dark, voluptuous “Corinthian Girlfriend” that inspired Goethe and Anatole France in “Noces. Corinthiennes “. With the same commitment and with the same disordered curiosity for everything that exceeds the limits of the human, Flegone wrote absurd tales of two-headed monsters and hermaphrodites giving birth. Conversation at the imperial table, at least on certain days, revolved around these subjects.
Those who would have preferred a “Diary of Hadrian” to “Memoirs of Hadrian” forget that a man of action rarely keeps a diary; later, at the end of a period of inactivity, he remembers, takes note and, more often than not, amazes.
If any other document were missing, Arrian’s letter to the emperor Hadrian on the circumnavigation of the Black Sea would suffice to recreate this imperial figure in its broad outline: the meticulous accuracy of the leader who wants to know everything, interest in the work of peace and war, taste for similar and well-made statues, passion for poems and legends of other times. And then that world, rare in all times and which will disappear completely after Marcus Aurelius, in which, despite the subtlest shades of deference and respect, the man of letters and the administrator still turn to the prince as a friend.
There is everything: the melancholy return to the ideal of Ancient Greece; discreet allusion to lost loves and mystical consolations sought by the survivor; attractiveness of unknown countries, of barbaric climates. The evocation, so profoundly pre-romantic, of the deserted regions inhabited by sea birds suggests the marvelous vase found in Villa Adriana in which, in the white snow of the marble, a flock of wild herons unfurls in flight in complete solitude.
Note from 1949: the more I try to make a similar portrait, the further I am away from the book and from the man I might like; only some lover of human destinies will understand.
Today the novel devours all forms; little by little one is forced to pass through it. This study of the fate of a man who called himself Hadrian in the seventeenth century would have been a tragedy; at the time of the Renaissance, an essay.
This book is the condensation of an enormous work developed for me alone. I had got into the habit of writing every night almost automatically the result of these long provoked visions, during which I inserted myself into the intimacy of another time. I took note of the smallest gestures, the most insignificant words, the most imperceptible nuances; the scenes, which in the current book are summarized in two lines, were described in great detail, as if you were seeing them in slow motion; these kinds of reports, if I had added them to each other, would have produced a volume of a few thousand pages. But every morning I set the night work on fire; so I wrote a very large number of very abstruse meditations and some quite obscene descriptions.
The man who is passionate about truth, or, if nothing else, exactness, is more often than not able to realize, like Pilate, that the truth is not pure. This leads to, mixed with direct affirmations, some hesitations, implications, deviations that a more conventional spirit would not have had; in certain moments, however rare, it even happened to me that the emperor was lying. In these cases, he had to be allowed to lie, like all of us.
How crude are those who say: “You are Adriano”; even more so are those who are surprised that such a remote and foreign subject has been chosen. The sorcerer who cuts his thumb at the moment of summoning the shadows knows that they will obey his call only by lapping his own blood; and he knows, or he should know, that the voices that speak to him are wiser and more worthy of attention than he shouts at him.
I did not take long to realize that I was writing the life of a great man; and consequently, greater respect for the truth, greater attention, and, for my part, greater silence.
In a certain sense, every life told is exemplary; it is written to attack or defend a system of the world, to define a method that is proper to us. But it is no less true that biographies generally disqualify themselves for an idealization or denigration at any cost, for endlessly exaggerated details or prudently omitted; instead of understanding a human being, one builds it.
Never lose sight of the graphic of a human existence, which is never composed, whatever one may say, of one horizontal and two perpendicular, but rather of three sinuous lines, infinitely prolonged, close together and diverging without rest: which correspond to what a man thought he was, to what he wanted to be, to what he was.
Whatever you do, you always rebuild the monument in your own way; but it is already a lot to use authentic stones.
Every being who has lived the human adventure is me.
The second century interests me because it was, for a very long period, that of the last free men; as far as we are concerned, we are already very far from that time.
On December 26, 1950, a cold evening on the shores of the Atlantic, in the almost polar silence of the Island of the Desert Mountains, in the United States, I tried to relive the stifling heat of a July day in 138 in Baia, the weight of the sheet on heavy and tired legs, the almost imperceptible murmur of a sea without tide that from time to time reaches a man completely absorbed by the noises of his agony. I tried to push myself to the last sip of water, the last collapse, the last image. The emperor has nothing but to die.
This book is not dedicated to anyone. It should have been to G. F .; it would have been, if it weren’t almost indecent to put a personal dedication on the head of a work from which I wanted, above all, to erase myself. But dedications, even the longest ones, are still an inadequate and banal way of honoring such an uncommon friendship. When I try to define this good that has been given to me for years, I tell myself that such a privilege, although so rare, cannot nevertheless be unique; that sometimes it must happen that in the adventure of a successful book or in the existence of a lucky writer, there has been someone, a little on the sidelines, who does not let pass the inexact or weak sentence that we would like to leave out of weariness; someone capable of rereading with us up to twenty times, if necessary, an uncertain page; someone who goes and fetches the large volumes for us from the library shelves in which perhaps we will still find a useful indication, and persists in consulting them again when fatigue had already made us close them; someone who supports us, approves us, sometimes contradicts us; that he participates with the same fervor in the joys of art and those of life, in the works of both, never boring and never easy; and it is neither our shadow nor our reflection nor our complement, but itself; and he leaves us a divine freedom but, at the same time, forces us to be fully what we are. “Hospes comesque”.
I learn in December 1951 the recent death of the German historian Wilhelm Weber, in April 1952 that of the scholar Paul Graindor, the works of which have served me a lot. In these days I spoke with two people, G. B. and J. F., who met the engraver Pierre Gusman in Rome at the time when he was intent on designing the localities of the Villa with passion. Feeling of belonging to a kind of “Gens Aelia”, of being part of the crowd of secretaries of the great man and participating in that vigil of the imperial guard mounted by humanists and poets, who take turns around a great memory. Thus a circle of spirits attracted by the same sympathies, thoughtful of the same problems, is formed through time (and the same happens, no doubt, with the specialists of Napoleon, of Dante’s lovers).
The Blazius, the Vadius exist; their big cousin Basile is still standing. Once – only once – I happened to find myself struck by that mixture of insults and barracks jokes, of truncated or cleverly deformed quotations to make our sentences say the nonsense they did not say; specious arguments, supported by statements that are both vague and peremptory enough for the reader who is respectful of academic qualifications and who has neither the time nor the desire to personally read up on the sources to believe in them. Things that characterize a particular genus, a specific species, fortunately very rare. How much good will, on the contrary, on the part of so many scholars who, in an age of frenzied specialization like ours, could very well have disdained as a whole any attempt at literary reconstruction that risked invading their little field … Many of them spontaneously they wanted to bother to rectify a sentence, confirm a detail, expose a hypothesis, facilitate further research … Too many, for me to refrain from addressing here my friendly thanks to these benevolent readers: every reprinted book owes something to decent people who they read it.
Do your best. Redo. Touch up this touch up imperceptibly again. “By correcting my works,” said Yeats, “I correct myself.”
Yesterday, at the Villa, I thought of the thousand and thousand silent existences, furtive like those of animals, unconscious like those of plants: vagrants from the times of Piranesi, looters of ruins, beggars, goatherds, peasants who have taken up accommodation as best they can in a corner of waste, which happened here between Adriano and us.
At the end of an olive grove, G. and I found ourselves facing the wicker bed of a shepherd, in an ancient corridor which had been half-cleared: his makeshift hanger stuck between two blocks of Roman cement; the still warm ashes of his little fire. A feeling of humble intimacy, somewhat analogous to that experienced in the Louvre, after closing, when the caretakers’ cots open up in the midst of the statues.
[1958. Nothing to change to the preceding lines. The shepherd’s coat rack, if not his bed, is still there; G. and I stopped on the grass of Tempe, among the violets, in that sacred moment of the year when everything starts again, despite the threats that modern man makes to weigh on himself in every place. But the Villa has undergone an insidious change; not complete, of course: a complex that has been gently destroyed and created by the centuries does not change so rapidly; but due to a rare mistake in Italy, dangerous “embellishments” were added to the necessary research and consolidation works; some olive trees have been cut to make way for an indiscreet parking lot and a kiosk-bar like an exhibition park: things that make the Pecile, its noble solitude a square in the station. A concrete fountain quenches the thirst of passers-by through a useless old fake stucco mask; another, even more useless, adorns the wall of the large swimming pool, enriched by a flotilla of ducks; Some rather banal Greek-Roman garden statues have been copied, also in stucco, chosen from finds from recent excavations: they deserved neither this honor nor this disdain. They are copies, made in a vulgar, swollen, soft material; placed at random on pedestals, they give the melancholy Canopus the appearance of a corner of Cinecittà, where the existence of the Caesars was reconstructed for a film. There is nothing more fragile than the balance of beautiful places. Our interpretations leave even the lyrics intact, they outlive our comments; but the slightest imprudent restoration inflicted on the stones, an asphalted road that contaminates a field where for centuries the grass sprouted in peace creates the irreparable. Beauty recedes; authenticity as well].
Places where we have chosen to live, invisible residences that we have built to protect ourselves from time. I lived in Tivoli, maybe I will die there, like Adriano on Achilles Island.
No. I have revisited the Villa once again; its pavilions made for intimacy and quiet, its vestiges of a luxury without pomp, the least imperial that was possible, as a rich connoisseur who tried to combine the pleasures of art with the peace of the fields; at the Pantheon, I looked for the exact spot where a patch of sun settled one morning, April 21; along the corridors of the Mausoleum, I retraced the funeral path followed many times by Cabria, Celere and Diotimo, friends of the last days.
But I no longer feel the immediate presence of those beings, the actuality of those facts; they remain close to me but by now they are outdated, neither more nor less like the memories of my existence. Our relationships with others have only a duration; when the satisfaction is obtained, the lesson is learned, the service rendered, the work done, they cease; what I was able to say has been said; what I could learn has been learned.
Let’s take care of other jobs now.
taken from: Marguerite Yourcenar, MEMORIE DI ADRIANO, followed by NOTEBOOKS, Translation by Lidia Storoni Mazzolani, First edition of “Memoires d’Hadrien” 1951, Librairie Plon, Paris 1963 and 1981 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Turin
