Today we read Fine del ‘68, by Eugenio Montale. I was hoping to find something a little more cheerful to welcome the New Year, but I’m afraid it was either another nursery rhyme or Montale.
And Montale is better. Sometimes one hears the advice to look at worldly matters and problems “from the perspective of an alien,” so that we can take a point of view that is not enmeshed in the presuppositions and conventions that we grew up into by default. This is more or less what Montale does in this poem: he looks down on Earth, where festivities for the New Year are about to explode, from the Moon. He distantly sees all that philosophy and literature, all those concerns we are so bent on, all the partying, and finds them strange. Nothing of that seem to make sense from the Moon, cold and distant, where he is alone. And, he says, when someone dies alone unknown and far away, nobody cares. The original: Ho contemplato dalla luna, o quasi,
il modesto pianeta che contiene
filosofia, teologia, politica,
pornografia, letteratura, scienze
palesi o arcane. Dentro c’è anche l’uomo,
ed io tra questi. E tutto è molto strano.
Tra poche ore sarà notte e l’anno
finirà tra esplosioni di spumanti
e di petardi. Forse di bombe o peggio,
ma non qui dove sto. Se uno muore
non importa a nessuno purché sia
sconosciuto e lontano.\ The music in this episode is De Torrente, from Vivaldi’s Dixit Dominus (RV 807), played by Cor i Orquestra de música antiga de l’Esmuc, Inés Alonso (soprano solista), Albert Baena (alto solista), Lluís Vila (director) (in the creative commons thanks to the Catalonia College of Music).
