Ibn ʿArabī (1165-1240) was an Andalusi Arab scholar, contemplative mystic, Sufi poet, and philosopher who was very influential within Islamic culture and religion. Ibn ʿArabī is considered a saint by some scholars and Muslim communities. In his poetry, there are traces of the Sufi metaphysical concept of “Wahdat ul-Wujud” (“Unity of Being”). This monist doctrine claimed that all things in the universe are manifestations of a singular divine reality. The following excerpt from the poem “Gentle Now, Doves” exhibits a theology of love that –just as the divine reality– in its infinite depth exceeds all naming and description.
Poet in a Garden, by Ali of Gloconda, c.1610-15, via Wikimedia.
Marvel, a garden among the flames!
My heart can take on any form For gazelles a meadow A cloister for monks
A temple for idols, pilgrim’s Ka`ba, tablets of Torah, scrolls of the Qur’ân I profess the religion of love Wherever its camels turn, there lives my faith
(39-41)
Bibliography
Ibn ’Arabi, Muhyiddin, and Michael Sells. The Translator of Desires: Poems. Vol. 150. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Web.
In a recent post on this blog, I reflected on the similarities between the international situation created by the current war in Ukraine and the one that gave rise to the First World War at the beginning of the last century. After one year, the more recent events in the Middle East, with the dramatic resurgence of the Arab-Israeli conflict, only confirm what I wrote in that post. Following Christopher Clark’s insights on how Europe went to war in 1914, I suggested the possibility that the escalation in ongoing conflicts and violent territorial controversies has the potential to give rise to a new world conflict, which, according to some, like Pope Francis, has already begun.
In a 2022 interview, Clark rejected the parallel between World War I and the war in Ukraine by emphasizing how differently the two wars began. However, the new conflict in the Middle East and its possible expansion suggest a progressive deterioration of the international situation characterized by an increasingly widespread, even if dispersed, war. As I write in November 2023, conflicts and wars are rising in Myanmar, Sudan, Niger, Gabon, and Azerbaijan. The point is that current politicians and the powers they represent behave like those Clark in his book defined as “sleepwalkers” at the dawn of the First World War, irresponsibly unaware of the possible catastrophic consequences of their choices and local conflicts. Clark himself, concluding his book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, draws a parallel between the 1914 political situation and the 2011-12 Eurozone financial crisis when “the political actors in the Eurozone crisis exploited the possibility of general catastrophe as leverage in securing their own specific advantages.” In this sense, he concludes, “The men of 1914 are our contemporaries” (555). And, I add, the new idea of war and peace that emerged during WW1 is impinging on us even if our historical context in some respects is different from the one that caused humanity to experience the brutality of the First World conflict.
How can we talk about peace in an international context like ours in which no national or supranational political authority has enough force and recognition for being legitimized and capable of inserting the war into a political-juridical context? To understand the new meaning and practicality of “peace,” one needs to consider it with the interpretation of war, as the two concepts are strictly intertwined and depend on each other. We are transformed into global citizens by the proliferation of media and witness wars and conflicts worldwide. There is the clear impression of living in one of those crucial historical moments when war’s dramatic gravity and ubiquity lead to inquiries into the deep meaning of words like “peace” and “war” as they seem to have lost their most acknowledged meaning. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (ca 535-475 BC) is a point of reference for what concerns the original meaning of such words that still have implications for us.
The philosopher Massimo Cacciari, in his 2016 essay “Il tramonto di padre Polemos” (The Twilight of Father Polemos), suggests going back to the root of war that he sees in the Greek word polemos, which Heraclitus connected to the Logos. The ancient philosopher understood Logos as reason, the discourse recognizing the profound true reality of things, their balance, proportion, and harmony. But for Heraclitus, the harmony identified by the Logos surpasses the doxa of shared or polar opinions and appears possible only in the unity of opposites brought about by polemos. In the deep, necessary, and rightful unity of distinctions and opposites that characterizes Logos, the war-polemos comes into play as the ordering and creative principle of Law, the Nomos, which, in a certain sense, opens the possibility of the peace discourse. But in this way, polemos, as a principle of peace, is inextricably tied to war, depends on it, and always expresses the presence of antitheses and contradictions.
From this perspective, peace is not the removal or denial of conflict but the precarious harmony of opposites, something that happens within the conflict, which can continually degenerate into unilateral or reciprocal hubris, menacing the fruition of any form of equilibrium. This degenerative possibility is especially true in the wars we are witnessing today. These wars have set aside or entirely lost their political character; today, the polemos no longer has the rightful harmony of opposites as its horizon and appears irreducible to any form of economic and pragmatic rationality (Cacciari 120-123).
Heraclitus (named outlined in red) in a fragment of Oxyrhynchus Papyri 3710, col. ii 43-47
Let’s have a closer look at Heraclitus’s fragments on war. As we read in fragment 53, for him, the war was the “father of all and king of all (Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς), and some he (polemos-war) shows as gods, others as men; some makes slave and other free” (Heraclitus 245). In other words, Heraclitus considers polemos the necessary and legitimate origins of humans and gods alike in the continuous struggle that gives birth to them and which they develop in an ever-changing world dominated by strife. In fragment 80, Heraclitus develops his idea of war-polemos into a cosmic vision: “One must know that war is common and right is strife and that all things are happening by strife and necessity” (Heraclitus 238). Heraclitus asserts here that war is common to all human beings and all things. The keywords associated with war in this fragment are “strife,” “necessity,” and “right.” They show how, for Heraclitus, polemos was a universal principle to be recognized as necessary in its association with strife and right. It is precisely this “positive” role of polemos, as “father” capable of finding the whole in the continuous play of opposites, that is ending in the present historical situation as an effective vehicle for political solutions leading to a viable if not durable equilibrium or peace if the use of this word still makes sense.
What is emerging today is the paradox of never-ending, widespread, multipolar wars, even in the presence of international agreements and temporary cease-fires. In our present world set of circumstances, we can see how Heraclitus’ idea of polemos loses the possibility of absorbing the opposites and finding an even momentary unity or “peace.” Today, Heraclitus’ vision is not a philosophical abstraction but an actual political scenario following the end of the international liberal order that was implemented at the end of WW2 in a system of alliances and institutions that became increasingly precarious, ineffective, and untenable. But for some philosophers and historians, WWI was the event that radically changed the perception of war and peace, along with their comprehension and definition. The unprecedented, widespread, pervasive, and cruel nature of the First World conflict led to a new interpretation of war as something that could not be viewed from the point of view of peace, developing a perspective in which war was not only a historical but also a “cosmic” phenomenon. When the approximately 20 million military and civilian war deaths began to be counted, no hyperbole seemed too exaggerated.
Austro-Hungarian First World War cemetery Lavarone, Italy – Photo by Massimo Lollini
Jan Patočka and the Twentieth Century as war
Jan Patočka (1907-1977), the Czech philosopher and author of critical essays on the philosophy of history from the point of view of existential phenomenology, was one the most vocal intellectuals in underlying the epochal nature of the First World Conflict. In one of his last articles entitled “Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War” (1976), he criticized all the explanations of the origin of WWI given from a historical point of view conditioned by the idea of “peace”:
“All of them –whether they view the war as a battle between the Germanic and the Slavic elements, as an imperialist conflict engendered by the last stage of capitalism, as a consequence of exaggerated modern subjectivism which the war violently objectified, or as a struggle between democracy and theocracy – have one thing in common: they all view war from the perspective of peace, of day, and of life, excluding the dark side of night” (116).
In other words, Patočka was convinced that WWI has always been interpreted based on nineteenth-century anthropocentric ideas, as an interruption of the continuum of history characterized by peace, progress, and the conviction that there exists no factual, objective sense of the world but that humans can impose such a sense with power and force (117). To the humans who entered the conflict (and to the interpreters of such conflict) was extraneous the idea that war itself might have the power to interpret and confer meaning. This anthropocentrism is yet another example of their sleepwalking.
Jan PatočKa, 1971
The politicians and nations who started the conflict were convinced to control the war and have the power to end it quickly. The events unexpectedly and dramatically contradicted this presumption. The war lasted a few years and had repercussions, leading to new conflicts throughout the century and beyond. In Patočka’s analysis, war appears under the dominion of the “Force,” an extraordinary complex of accumulation of energies that lasted since immemorial time and finally found a way to explode in historical time in the First World conflict. Humans and nations in this extraordinary event are mere transmitters of signals coming from the “Force.” On the one hand, the embodiments of this overwhelming force and icons of such a war are the techno-scientific apparatus of the total mobilization incarnated above all by Germany. On the other, the frontline where the soldiers of every nation at war were confined for years.
The idea of total mobilization, which Patočka articulates in dialogue with Ernst Jünger (1885-1998), is the main characteristic of war as the historical essence of the twentieth century. It does point neither to an organization –something that individuals, nations, or states govern– nor to a measure to be carried out by humans. It is something that is accomplished by itself; it is, in war as in peace, the expression of the mysterious and inexorable law to which the techno-scientific age of the masses and machines delivers the individuals and the nations. On the other hand, the experience of the front, which Patočka describes in dialogue with Teilhard de Chardin, does not represent a momentary trauma but a fundamental and permanent mutation of human existence. Paradoxically, to be on the frontline and trenches of WWI, even for a few days, however terrible and dramatic, was a “profoundly and mysteriously positive experience,” consisting of a feeling of meaningfulness and the attempt at articulating it in words. This feeling has different phases and depths which play an important role in subsequent years:
“The first phase is the experience of senselessness and of intolerable dread. The front is absurdity par excellence. That which had been only suspected has materialized: what is most precious is mercilessly torn to shreds. War proves ad oculos that the world is perfectly ripe for destruction.” (120)
1st Lancashire Fusiliers (infantry regiment of the British Army), in communication trench near Beaumont Hamel, Somme, 1916. Photo by Ernest Brooks
In the WWI trenches, the individuals had to face the shattered world. In the following years, upon returning home, the same individuals are re-captured by the same forces of that broken world and mobilized for a new struggle: the war against wars. In this way, the senselessness of life and war experienced in the trenches ends, and humans look for meaning in a new war, a war against wars. As H.R. Wells (1866-1946) writes in his The War That Will End War (1914), the First World Conflict was conceptualized early as the “War to end War” from the point of view of a peace eventually possible only with the defeat of the Central Powers and German militarism. For Patočka, this idea of peace is not credible or sustainable, even when, in 1917, the Russian Revolution introduced the idea of a revolutionary war to end the war. From that time, the war was waged by waiting and counting on the mutual weakening or even destruction of the opponents, who were condemned to a struggle for life and death. The exhaustion of one and the victory of the other would become a mere tactical moment of another battle; the victory will only be an appearance that eventually will lead to future defeat, which will be the incubator of new struggles. For Patočka, and this is a crucial point, a victorious peace is a pure “illusion.” In such a “peace,” the victor morally decays; what really triumphs in this war for reciprocal destruction is “Force,” which imposes its yoke on both victors and defeated, and peace becomes a part of the continuous war. (121)
For Patočka, “peace” can become the will and instrument of war only when the protagonists live under the “rule of day” and remain attached to their career, family, and all the values and ideals that are considered essential in ordinary life. In this way, they reify and alienate themselves in the name of the possibilities they fear losing. This circumstance differs significantly from the soldiers who fought in the trenches and the front of WWI, experiencing what Patočka calls the “night” of life. Having lost everything that pertains to normal life, they become “free” from all interests of life and peace: what Patočka calls the interests ruled by the day. Their experience of loss is as absolute as the “freedom” they experience. In this context, “the sacrifice of lives loses its meaning as an avenue toward programs of construction, progress, enhanced and expanded life possibilities and instead acquires a meaning exclusively in and of itself” (122). In other words, the war starts to be perceived for what it is, an absolute experience whose meaning cannot be depended on anything else, so much so on peace.
Trenches of the 11th Cheshire Regiment at Ovillers-la-Boisselle, on the Somme, July 1916. One sentry keeps watch while the others sleep. Photo by Ernest Brooks
Patočka argues that, unfortunately, this extraordinary experience –which can end the fascination with war so prevalent in the twentieth century and open the road to an authentic discussion on the meaning of peace– did not have any impact on the history of last century, which continues to be a prisoner of the reification of the “day” and consequently the obsession and compulsion toward war. In this context, it is hard to understand and admit that war incorporates “peace” within itself through various attempts of demobilization. For Patočka, the rule of the day makes it difficult to discern whether these attempts to find agreements in reducing the military expenses are genuine or, on the contrary, result in nothing more than leading to a permanent war, which is establishing itself through “peaceful” means.
The stalemate of the peace discourse can be challenged and modified only by bringing the “experience of the front” to bear history, becoming a historical factor. Only the “solidarity of the shattered“, the consensus of those who experienced the front and know about the meaning of life and death, can see that “there is a limit to everyday, to its life and its ‘peace'” (125). The day and the life cannot exist without releasing “Force.” On the contrary, “The solidarity of the shattered can say ‘No’ to mobilizations which eternalize the state of war. It will not offer positive programs but will, as Socrates’ daimonion, speak in warnings. It shall create a spiritual atmosphere and become a spiritual power that will impose certain limitations on the warring world” (ibi).
Patočka concludes his essay with a significant reference to Heraclitus’s vision of war, which he connects with the vision that emerged from Teilhard’s and Jünger’s experience of the WW1 front. He underlines that Heraclitus “formulated the idea of war as the divine law which nourishes all that is human” (126). The divine aspect of war did not simply consist of the heroes engaged in it trying to push the limits of human capacities to conquer everlasting fame among mortal men. The divine element brought about by polemos was the comprehension that war ” is nothing one-sided” and, on the contrary, “it unites rather than divides the mutual enemies.” In this perspective, the opposing enemies, in the end, find unity; they become “wholes” in the shattering of everyday interests and touching upon something primordial that escapes ordinary human life, “what is eternal in everything, upon the source of all being, upon what thus is divine.” (ibi) This realization, Patočka concludes, was also the outcome of the experience of the front for Teilhard and Jünger.
Aerial Photography on the Western Front, 1916. British (upper) and German (lower) frontline trenches, 1916
The sources for a comprehensive re-examination of the meaning of “war” and “peace” that we have considered so far are mainly philosophical. But it is essential to see that historians themselves are re-examining the meaning and lengths of the Twentieth-century wars and realizing how the idea of peace as separated from war is untenable in our time. From this point of view, the Versailles “peace” that was supposed to end the First World War imposing too harsh conditions on Germany set the stage for World War Two. In this regard, the volumes 1914 -1945. L’Italia nella guerra europea dei trent’anni, (1914-1915 Italy in the Thirty Years European War) curated by Simone Neri Serneri, and, in a broader viewpoint, El mundo en llamas: La larga guerra 1914-1945 (The World in Flames: The Long War 1914-1945) by Marina Amaral and Dan Jones, consider the period that goes from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo to the atomic bomb of Hiroshima, a “long war” that not only included the First and the Second World War but all the conflicts that spotted the interwar period, such as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).
The historical approach, attentive to the intersection of war and peace in the Twentieth century, sheds light on what we are experiencing today and helps us understand why Pope Francis says we are already living through the Third World War. Furthermore, the new vision of the wars of the last century and their connection with the wars we are experiencing today is reinforced by geopolitical scholars such as Lucio Caracciolo, who considers the actual conflicts as the result of questions left unsolved by the First World conflict. He writes, “The actual geopolitical antagonisms can be configured as wars of succession for hegemony in the territories evacuated by the four European empires that collapsed in World War One” (47). He concludes, “The scars provoked by World War One were never sutured … The First World War continues to irradiate into contemporary Europe” (58).
The witness and the night of the war
The question at the center of this post (How can we talk about peace?) remains open. For sure, there are different ways of talking about peace. In dialogue with ancient philosopher Heraclitus and contemporary philosophers Cacciari and Patočka, I have introduced so far two different and opposite points of view. On the one hand, for those who consider peace in antagonism with war, peace is the goal from which to interpret war. This perspective on peace is prevalent in world culture and politics today. Still, it is ineffective in grasping the true nature of current wars and ultimately works in the direction of the existing conflicts, preparing for new ones, eventually in the form of a “war to end wars.” On the other hand, the second view on peace does not consider it as separate from war. In this light, war and conflicts are part of the human condition and have to be evaluated and presented for what they are: as something extremely dangerous and destructive that is not in complete human control, rather than a reality simply governable by humans, as an interruption of the historical continuum characterized by peace. The second view is not interested in finding the “causes” of the wars, taking sides, and perpetuating the cycle of war. If we want to consider the war in itself for what it really is, it is necessary to listen to the voices of those who fought in the war and touched the bottom in the trenches and the frontline.
The question of how we can talk about peace then gives way to another crucial question: How can we have the witnesses who experienced the night of the war bear on history? I have tried to address this question in my 2001 book Il Vuoto della Forma: Scrittura, Testimonianza e Verità (The Emptiness of Form: Writing, Testimony and Truth). In closing this post, I would like to mention an Italian witness of WWI I have studied in that publication, Renato Serra (1884-1915). He was an important Italian writer and literary critic in the early twentieth century who died in the trenches of WWI. Enlisted, with the rank of lieutenant, in the 11th Infantry Regiment of the “Casale” Brigade, he fought with his unit in the Podgora sector, near Gorizia, Italy, participating in the Second and Third Battles of the Isonzo. During the latter, on July 20, 1915, he was killed in combat on Mount Podgora in Gorizia, aged only 31.
Renato SerraTrench diary, 1915
He started his groundbreaking reflection on how to represent war in a short note, Partenza di un gruppo di soldati per la Libia (1912; On the Departure of a Group of Soldiers for Libya), he wrote commenting on the departure of a group of Italian soldiers going to fight in Libya in the name of Italian colonialism. Serra is skeptical precisely about the possibility of describing a war with all the violence implied in it through ordinary discourses, nationalist propaganda, and the ordinary rhetoric of history and literature. The truth about war, he holds, cannot be found in the news, literary writings, or history books: it can only be witnessed by those who died in the war, by those who do not return home to recount the dramatic events in which they were participating. He writes, “No one can tell. No one knows. Those who return alive, ruined and stunned by the long months of war, will know less than those who do not return, lying in the sand” (523).
In this brief writing on the Departure of a group of soldiers to Libya, Serra’s speculative aptitude presents one of its most lucid and penetrating insights. His discussion of the testimony anticipates in an exemplary fashion what other witnesses will see more clearly at the height of the great historical tragedies of the twentieth century. It is appropriate to recall in this context how, in his statement, Serra significantly foresees the discourse on the testimony carried out by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved (1985) when he writes that the real witnesses of the Shoah are the “submerged,” those who did not return to recount the horror that buried them. Likewise, when he writes that every testimony bears witness only to itself, “Every testimony bears witness only to itself; to its own moment, its own origin, its own end, and nothing else” (Partenza di un gruppo di soldati per la Libia, 532), Serra foretells the words of another great poet and witness to the Shoah, Paul Celan, when he writes, “Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen” (62; No one bears witness for the witness). A revealing and revering silence surrounds these witnesses’ noble and unique voices; their words should be taken for what they are, fully condemning any rhetorical or political appropriation of events such as wars or “catastrophes” such as the Sohah.
Serra communicates his decision to participate in WWI in one of the twentieth century’s most original and fascinating essays, Esame di coscienza di un letterato (1915; Examination of conscience of a man of letters). His choice has deep ethical motivation and focuses on detachment from action and its fruits and ends up criticizing the root of the political discourse, which remains unable to disengage itself from words such as “fatherland,” “democracy,” and “freedom,” words that for Serra become abstract entities devoid of foundation in front of the event and the true nature of the war. Serra’s analysis reveals the existential emptiness within himself in front of what he perceives as an absolute event; the emptiness for him becomes an ethical choice rather than a sign of pure passivity or nihilism. It goes hand in hand with emptying the meaning of any validation of the war. In his choice, war acquires a value in itself, losing all historical-rational motivations. War becomes an event outside of time as an expression of the Heraclitean flow that is frightening and unescapable, in front of which the human subject feels all his own precariousness. Serra speaks of his fear of this Heraclitean flow at the end of Partenza di ungruppo di soldati per la Libia (534). In this perspective, at the end of the Esame di coscienza di unletterato, he connects war to the eternal and conflictual unity of the universe, finding a concrete expression in his will to live and choice to participate in the war. Concentrating on life’s essential and bodily dimensions in Serra’s examination of conscience leads to recognizing the fundamental Force dominating the universe conveyed by the body’s vital passion. In Serra’s vocabulary, “Force” takes the name of Schopenhauer’s “Will.”
Examination of conscience of a man of letters, explicit
In words that directly recall Schopenhauer’s will to life, Serra writes: “To live we want and not to die, even if we are touched by what which cannot be escaped with the body, and which is always life when we meet it while walking on our way” (142). Ultimately, these words confirm the appreciation of what the witnesses evoked by Patočka perceived as a more-than-human reality, entitling the realization of war as an elemental dimension of human life. The Schopenhauerian idea of the universe as an ordered conflictual unity we see at play here goes along with Heraclitus’ thesis that agonistic relations universally inhere. For Serra, both the victors and the defeated are subjected to this Force, and the war will not change anything in human history. In this perspective he decides to walk along with the other human beings going to fight in the war even if they do not know why (144-145). In the letters from the front and in the Trench Diary, Serra wants to appreciate the “bare and mute reality” of the war. Private Serra quickly gets used to the noises of the war and willingly loses himself in landscape impressions, which absorb him in a provisional and superficial manner. However, an impressive state of mind that cannot be eluded or even described breaks out of these fleeting moments. It is a sensation of “something deeper, which irresistibly transports everyone…” (Letter to Giovanni Lazzarini, July 14 1915, p.600).
There is no writing for these moments and these sensations that cannot reach the consistency of the “fact.” Not even Tolstoi was able to give a complete representation of these instants in which reality appears to Serra “naked and silent” and in which the war seems dominated by “something deeper,” a “force” that takes hold of all combatants. There are no names for this Force and no works of art or literary masterpieces in which it has found adequate expression, except for the oriental epic, the Iliad, the tragedies of Aeschylus, and a few others, as Simone Weil wrote. These works express in an unsurpassed manner “the subordination of the human soul to Force,” the “danger of destruction” continually suspended on human life, the profound meaning of “human misery” which can only shine through in extreme moments emerging from the armor of lies and recognizing the “rule of Force” (Weil, 32 and ff.).
If, in closing, I were to summarize the notion of peace and war that emerges from the voices of those who, in different ways and historical moments, touched the bottom of the violence of the twentieth century, I should write that their testimony bears witness to the “night of the war,” to use Patočka words, and in so doing their testimony opens the road to an authentic peace discourse. In the next post on Homer and the Axial Age sages, I will further reflect on the idea of Force that emerges in Heraclitus as an expression of polemos and on its ancient and modern re-articulations. The overarching question of the new post will still be, “How can we talk about peace?”
Bibliography
Cacciari, Massimo. “Il tramonto di Padre Polemos” in Massimo Cacciari et al. Senza La Guerra. Bologna: Il Mulino 2016. 87-125.
Caracciolo, Lucio. “L’eredità geopolitica della Grande guerra” in Massimo Cacciari et al. Senza La Guerra. Bologna: Il Mulino 2016. 43-60.
Celan, Paul. “Ashglory” from Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry: A Bilingual Edition. First ed. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2014.
Kirk, G. S. (Geoffrey Stephen), and Heraclitus. Heraclitus : The Cosmic Fragments. Cambridge: University Press, 1962. Print.
Lollini, Massimo. Il Vuoto della Forma. Scrittura, Testimonianza e Verità. Genova: Marietti, 2001.
Patočka, Jan. “Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War”. Telos 30 (Winter 1976–77). New York: Telos Press. 116-126.
Levi Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage International, 1988.
Serra, Renato. Esame di coscienza di un letterato. Carte Rolland. Diario di trincea. Edizione critica. M. Biondi and R. Greggi. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2015.
—.”Partenza di un gruppo di soldati per la Libia.” Scritti di Renato Serra. G. De Robertis and A.Grilli Editors. Firenze: Le Monnier, 1958. pp.521-534.
—. Epistolario, a c. di L. Ambrosini, G. De Robertis e A. Grilli, Le Monnier, Firenze 1953;
Weil, Simone. “L’Iliade, ou le poème de la force” “La Source Grecque. Paris: Gallimard, 1953. Print. 11-42.
Wells H. G. The War That Will End War. New York, Duffield 1914.
It is one of the oldest poems in Italian literature, composed in the illustrious Umbrian vernacular and not in Latin because Saint Francis wanted to reach a vast audience. The metric form of the composition is rhythmic assonance prose or rhymed with stanzas of two, three, or five long verses of irregular size. Inspired by the model of the biblical Psalms of David, the Canticle was intended for singing.
It expresses with awesome simplicity the admiration for the beauty of creation and exhorts peace, forgiveness, and acceptance of suffering as a means of purification, leading to eternal bliss. Reading this poem today means returning to reflect on the meaning of peace in a time like ours, obsessed with increasingly dangerous and destructive wars. I will carry out this reflection in another post on this blog.
St. Francis preaching to the birds outside of Bevagna (Master of St. Francis). Public Domain.
Altissimu, onnipotente, bon Signore, tue so’ le laude, la gloria e l’honore et onne benedictione.
Ad te solo, Altissimo, se konfano, et nullu homo ène dignu te mentovare.
Laudato sie, mi’ Signore, cum tucte le tue creature, spetialmente messor lo frate sole, lo qual’è iorno, et allumini noi per lui. Et ellu è bellu e radiante cum grande splendore: de te, Altissimo, porta significatione.
Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per sora luna e le stelle: in celu l’ài formate clarite et pretiose et belle.
Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per frate vento et per aere et nubilo et sereno et onne tempo, per lo quale a le tue creature dài sustentamento.
Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per sor’aqua, la quale è multo utile et humile et pretiosa et casta.
Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per frate focu, per lo quale ennallumini la nocte: ed elio è bello et iocundo et robustoso et forte.
Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per sora nostra matre terra, la quale ne sustenta et governa, et produce diversi fructi con coloriti fiori et herba.
Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per quelli ke perdonano per lo tuo amore et sostengo infirmitate et tribulatione.
Beati quelli ke ‘I sosterrano in pace, ka da te, Altissimo, sirano incoronati.
Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per sora nostra morte corporale, da la quale nullu homo vivente pò skappare: guai a·cquelli ke morrano ne le peccata mortali; beati quelli ke trovarà ne le tue sanctissime voluntati, ka la morte secunda no ‘I farrà male.
Laudate e benedicete mi’ Signore et rengratiate e serviateli cum grande humilitate.
The Canticle of Brother Sun
Most high, all-powerful, all good, Lord! All praise is yours, all glory, all honour And all blessing. To you, alone, Most High, do they belong. No mortal lips are worthy To pronounce your name. All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made, And first my lord Brother Sun, Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him. How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendour! Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness. All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Moon and Stars; In the heavens you have made them, bright And precious and fair. All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air, And fair and stormy, all the weather’s moods, By which you cherish all that you have made. All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Water, So useful, lowly, precious, and pure. All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brother Fire, Through whom you brighten up the night. How beautiful is he, how gay! Full of power and strength. All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Earth, our mother, Who feeds us in her sovereignty and produces Various fruits with coloured flowers and herbs. All praise be yours, my Lord, through those who grant pardon For love of you; through those who endure Sickness and trial. Happy those who endure in peace, By you, Most High, they will be crowned. All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death, From whose embrace no mortal can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin! Happy those She finds doing your will! The second death can do no harm to them. Praise and bless my Lord, and give him thanks, And serve him with great humility.
*** The Italian preposition per is used in the meaning of instrumentality, that is, by means of or through. In this perspective, the praise is not directed to the creatures, nor to Almighty God for the creatures: it means “be praised Lord through the moon and the stars.” However, per can also indicate “agency” (by): “be praised by the moon” or “cause”: “because you created the moon.”
Bibliography
Francesco d’Assisi. “Il cantico di Frate Sole,” in Poeti Del Duecento. Edited by G. Contini. Milano-Napoli: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1960, pp. 33-34.
Francis of Assisi. “The Canticle of Brother Sun,” translated by Benen Fahy. In Habig Marion A and John R. H Moorman. St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies; English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis. 3rd rev ed. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press 1973, pp. 130-131.
Talking about war after more than 100 days of the current conflict in Ukraine is something that seems natural and unavoidable. The devastating event of the war has penetrated the life of the world population through the media and various sources of information, including the millions of Ukrainian refugees forced to flee their country, becoming witnesses and protagonists of one of the most violent humanitarian crises in human history.
The local warfare soon engulfed the global scene through unprecedented economic sanctions against Russia and substantial military aid to Ukraine. In these tragic days, it can be useful to rethink what the First World War was like. Are there still lessons we can reflect on and continue to learn from the first terrible carnage that befell Europe and the world?
Our attempt to answer this question is divided into two parts. First of all, a reflection on the origins of the WW1; secondly, a closer look at one of the least studied and known aspects of the conflict: the so-called “white war” that was fought on the Dolomites and the Italian-Austrian front.
In the concluding paragraphs, I argue that the time of war belongs not only to human history but also to natural history. Forgetting this reflection is at the origin of the hubris that characterizes human civilization and is increasingly evident in the time we call the Anthropocene.
Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914
Our point of reference in trying to reconstruct the origin of the first world conflict is a book entitled Sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914 (2012) by Christopher Clark a professor of modern European history at Cambridge. In this book, he maps carefully the complex mechanism of events and misjudgments that led to the war. Its methodological approach is highly innovative and substantive. For Clark, first, we need to consider that the war originated from a very intricate and multilateral political crisis and that we have an oversupply of sources, hundred of thousand pages written on World War 1, most of which are committed to attributing to the enemies the faults of war.
Then, he continues, we need to ask ourselves what is the crucial question to ask: why did the war begin or how it did begin? He invites us to realize that while the “why” question looks for absolute and categorical causes of the war, the “how” question instead looks for the multilateral interaction that produced the war scenario. Moreover, whereas the “why” question is after guilt and responsibility, the “how” question is more oriented toward a broad and open understanding. Even though the two questions can be considered interdependent, for Clark it is crucial that we let the “why” answers grow out of the “how” answers rather than the other way around.
What strikes me in Clark’s approach is the fact that he draws our attention to the “how” question and holds that far from being inevitable this war was in fact improbable at least until it actually happened. In other words, he supports the idea of contingency in the unfolding of the war as opposed to over-determination implicit in the question of “why” the war started. Clark’s approach is highly original as he avoids what most historians do, inserting the question of culpability at the center of the discourse on the war. In this attitude, these historians repeat what was established by the 1919 peace treaty of Versailles in which the victors asserted that German and their allies were morally responsible for the outbreak of the war.
Also, Clark’s approach contrasts the idea held by most historians as they suggest that the pre-war European system had somehow locked itself into a system of alliances from which war was the only way out. This point of view for him is a form of over-determination. On the one hand, the pre-war European system of alliances included the Triple Alliance that was formed in 1882 between German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. It was a defensive alliance. On the other hand, there was the Triple Entente (1907) which included Russia, France, and the United Kingdom. The latter was not an alliance of defense as was formed to counterbalance the power of the Triple Alliance. For Clark the pre-war European situation, notwithstanding this system of alliances, was still very much dynamic and open to different possibilities.
The Triple Alliance as opposed to the Triple Entente in 1914
The war started after the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir Duke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb Yugoslav nationalist. This event triggered the July crisis after, on July 23rd, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia. This series of events led to the outbreak of World War One. These events include the complex web of alliances that we mentioned but above all Clark insists on the miscalculation that brought many leaders to believe that war was in their best interest; or that a world war would not occur. This combination of factors resulted in a general outbreak of hostilities among almost every major European nation.
The war started in August 1914 by May 1915 every major European nation was involved in it. Christopher Clark concludes that there is no smoking gun in this story; rather there is one gun in the hands of every major character. The war viewed in this light was not a crime but a tragedy. In the last pages of his book, Clark explains why for him the European leaders in 1914 were sleepwalkers: they were watchful, he says, but unseeing “they were haunted by dreams and yet blind to the reality of the horror that they were about to bring into the world” (562).
It could be said that unlike the First World War at the origin of the current war in Ukraine, the smoking gun exists: Russia invaded Ukraine unilaterally. But similar to what happened at the genesis of the First World War, before us we have the unfolding of a tragedy of which the protagonists do not seem aware. From this point of view, all the governments involved and the powerful of the world today closely resemble the sleepwalkers of 1914. However, there is a further difference between the two situations that should be noted. Compared to 1914, the destructive potential of technology has grown exponentially, to the point of contemplating the destruction of the planet with the atomic threat. This makes the actual sleepwalkers’ sleep even more dramatic.
The Italian Front
A confirmation of Cristopher Clark’s analysis comes from the study of how Italy entered the war. In July 1914, Italy still had the possibility of not entering the war or entering it otherwise. Italy still was a partner in the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary but decided to remain neutral; at the same time, it developed a detailed military plan to attack France preparing to fight on the side of Germany and Austria.
However, the majority of the Italian population did not want the war which was then imposed from above by Italy’s King and political authorities. Before anything else, it was a media war through which an aggressive and violent minority imposed itself on the majority. A prominent figure in the war propaganda was the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. His public speeches were meant to create high tension in the country and collective emotions in favor of the war.
Among the most ardent nationalists and supporters of the war in Italy are the Futurists. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder, and leader of this artistic and literary avant-garde movement argued that war is the only hygiene in the world and used a particularly violent language during the so-called Futurist evenings to endorse the war.
Frontispiece of F.T. Marinetti, War the Only Hygiene of the World
As is the case today, the manipulation of news and the ability to build and disseminate false information has been fundamental in exacerbating the nationalistic climate, carrying out the military plans, and in consolidating the full support of the internal and external public opinion.
For Italy, the decision to enter the war turned out to be a gamble, fabricated on uncertain geopolitical alliances and unsteady military calculations.
Achille Beltrame – Domenica del corriere 23-30 maggio 1915
During the immediate pre-war years, Italy started aligning itself closer to the Entente powers for economic support; in April 1915, it negotiated with the Entente powers the secret Pact of London by which Italy was granted the right to attain the Italian-populated lands from Austria-Hungary, as well as concessions in the Balkan Peninsula. Subsequently, in May 1915, Italy resigned from the Triple Alliance and declared war against Austria-Hungary.
The will to conquer the status of “great power” in the Adriatic and Balkan area is what drove the Italian King Victor Emmanuel the 3d and the Italian government presided by conservative Antonio Salandra to enter the war. Besides the prevalent conservative forces, there was also a minority of democratic interventionists, like Cesare Battisti, who wanted to liberate” Italian-speaking populations from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to emancipate the Danubian and Slavic peoples from what they considered their despotic government. In Italy, the majority of the population and the majority of the parliament were against the war but the opposition to the war was not effective.
The Italian military command (general Luigi Cadorna) rapidly adapts to the new situation which resulted from the fact that Italy had abandoned the triple Alliance in favor of the Triple Entente. However, the Italian army was characterized by unpreparedness, lack of coordination, slowness in carrying out the military plans, miscalculations, especially the idea that the war would last only a few months. The Italian front was called, the Alpine Front (Gebirgskrieg); for the Austro-Hungarian command, it was considered the Southwest Front. For the rest of the world, it was called the Austro-Italian Front.
The strategic plan of the Italian army was based on a defensive attitude in the western sector, where the Dolomites were located, and an offensive in the east, trying to reach the heart of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. After occupying the frontier territory, in June the Italians launched their first assault on the Austro-Hungarian fortified positions, lined up along the course of the Isonzo river. The assault was attempted eleven times all of which failed. These are called the eleven Battles of the Isonzo.
In October 1917, the Central Powers carried out their own offense, known as the Battle of Caporetto, in which the Italians were defeated with huge losses. The bloody aftermath of Caporetto was vividly described by Ernest Hemingway in his novel A Farewell to Arms. Driven south after the Battle of Caporetto, the Italian Army was able to regroup and form a defensive line along the Piave River. The Austro-Hungarian Army tried their last offensive of the Great War in June 1918 and failed. In October they were defeated by the Italians in Vittorio Veneto which was the last battle of the war on the Italian front. To conclude, the war on the Italian front was not decided in the battles on the Dolomites mountains. The decisive battles were the battle of Caporetto (1917) in the valley of the river Isonzo and the final battle of Vittorio Veneto (1918).
World War I historiography on the southern front has recently progressed over the bleak picture painted by Christopher Clark. Of course, the commonplaces and negative myths that the conflict’s protagonists have conceived towards their enemies have remained. For example, to the Italians, Austria-Hungary was represented in terms of the eternal oppressor enemy during the conflict. Conversely, to the Austrians, Italy had been designed as an unfair ally and morally condemned. These two stereotypes continue to re-emerge in narratives and reconstructions of the war. Just as the idea spread by Italian propaganda that the opposing troops were in numerical dominance and always better fortified than the Italian ones is hard to die.
However, today there is a historiography that wants to be transnational and overcome the nationalist propaganda extremism that reached the point of arguing that the enemies were completely alien, not even human. A noble example of this kind of transnational, more objective historiography is the volume curated by Nicola Labanca and Oswald Überegger, La Guerra Italo-Austriaca, 1915-1918).
The White War
From 1915, the high peaks of the Dolomites were the area of the widest and most extreme mountain warfare. Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops clashed at altitudes up to 12,000 feet (3,600 meters) with temperatures as low as -22°F (-30°C) in the Guerra Bianca, or White War, named for its wintry theater.
Austro-Hungarian soldiers marching in the snow
Austrian soldiers entrenched themselves first in the highest mountains, leaving only the lowest positions to the enemies. For the strategic conceptions of the time, the highest position was erroneously considered an advantage; the valleys were believed dangerous as exposed to shelling and unfavorable to carry out assaults. This concept was in fact contradicted by the battle of Caporetto in the valley of the river Isonzo, won by the Austrian soldiers.
Italy had hoped to gain the territories of the Dolomites with a surprise offensive that was carried out too slowly to be effective. The Italian front soon was transformed into trench warfare, a war tactic that was commonly used everywhere in WW1. In trench warfare, the two sides fighting each other dig trenches on a battlefield to stop the enemy from advancing. Barbed wire fences became part of the landscape very everywhere.
The living conditions in the trenches were terrible. The area between opposing trench lines (known as “no man’s land”) was fully exposed to artillery fire from both sides, creating a situation in which it was possible to die even for friendly fire. Hundreds of deadly assaults on both sides produced no substantial change in enemy positions due to the extreme hardships that the mountain opposed to the advancement of the troops including the landslides that killed thousands of soldiers.
The war transformed dramatically the mountain landscape. For the first time in history, men brought modern technology up the highest mountains building roads, cableways, telephone and electric lines, and accommodations for thousands of troops. Supplying the mountain outposts would prove challenging for both armies. Much of the equipment had to be carried by hand with the help of horses and mules. Delivering heavier loads required mechanical improvisations. Sometimes even mules could not make the trek. Indeed, the destruction of the war affected not only human beings but also animals whose sacrifice is not always reported in history books.
In the winter, the trenches were built with snow and into the ice. The Marmolada, the highest peak in the Dolomites, was the site of a year-round “ice-city” where both sides dug into a glacier. The Austrian Corps of Engineers dug an entire “ice city”—a complex of tunnels, dormitories, and storerooms—out of the glacier. Soldiers had to drill holes into the ice to place explosives and begin the massive task of digging a tunnel under enemy lines.
A unique element of mountain warfare was the gallery, a man-built cave in the mountain rock serving as a place of relative protection. Variations in the design could turn the gallery into a partly shielded observation, artillery, or machine-gun post. Both belligerent sides had to adapt to the mountain, soon realizing the impossibility of conquering these inaccessible sites. A stalemate soon arose whereby the war then moved inside the mountains, turning into an exhausting war of mines with unprecedented violence that deeply affected the Dolomites landscape, leaving indelible marks. The opposing armies used mines to dig tunnels and galleries.
I briefly recall a famous example before concluding: the Lagazuoi mountain (2,835 meters; 9,301 ft), in the heart of the Dolomites. While the Austrian troops had occupied the crest of the mountain, the Italians attacked from below. From the end of February 1917, the Italians had begun to dig the first tunnels in the solid Dolomite rocks with the intention of surprising the Austrians on the summit of the mountain by blowing up a mine. They had occupied important positions on the side of the Piccolo Lagazuoi including a thin ledge renamed Cengia Martini after the name of Captain Ettore Martini.
The Austrians had already tried twice to blow up the Lagazuoi in order to drive away the Italians, without succeeding. At this point, the Italian soldiers dig a corridor over a kilometer long inside the Piccolo Lagazuoi, working day and night for the construction of a tunnel, two meters high and two meters wide, proceeding at a rate of six meters a day. At the end of June and early July, this unprecedented enterprise was completed and the mine was detonated without producing any substantial change in the war of position between the two armies.
But the mine war had devastating effects on the Dolomite peaks. The most powerful of the Austrian mines detonated May 22, 1917 blew up a part of the wall of the Piccolo Lagazuoi 199 meters high and 136 meters wide; while the mine of 32,664 kilos of explosives detonated by the Italians on June 20, 1917 caused a gigantic landslide still identifiable along the side of the wall just to the east of the cable car that climbs from the Pass to the top (Marco Avanzini and Isabella Salvador). A beautiful 1931 film by Luis Trenker, Berge in Flammen (Mountains on Fire), immortalized the memory of those destructive explosions in highly effective images.
The Lagazuoi Gallery is today the longest gallery of WW1 among those preserved in the Dolomites. The Italian tunnel, 1100 meters long, has been totally restored and equipped with ladders and steel rope.
Lagazuoi Gallery, Photo by Massimo Lollini
The excursion going down the tunnel not only represents an exceptional experience due to its particular characteristics but also offers an immediate synthesis of the extreme difficulties in which the soldiers of both armies operated.
Never before had a war been photographed and represented so systematically through the photographic image. The Italian Army Photography Service included 600 photographers that produced a total of 150,000 negatives. The images were filtrated by the censorship that allow only positive representations of the Italian soldiers that were then published in newspapers and magazines such as l’Illustrazione Italiana.
The images of dead soldiers were prohibited by censorship and self-censorship but death was a daily reality in the trenches and among civilians on the Italian Front; ultimately counting hundred of thousands of deaths on both sides out of the total number of 10 million dead soldiers of WW1.
The traces and remains of some of these dead are inscribed in the Dolomites landscape and even today, when the ice melts, some corpses of dead soldiers re-emerge like the ones you see in this picture.
The bodies of two Austrian soldiers were found on the Presena Glacier in 2012. Office for Archaeological Finds, Autonomous Province of Trento
The White War was a period of history frozen in time until the 1990s when global warming started to reveal corpses and relics of WW1. Thousands of soldiers have been killed by avalanches, falling down mountains, or hypothermia. Dozens of corpses, some still in their uniforms, have emerged from the melting ice over the past decades (Leander).
From this point of view, the signs that can be read in the Dolomites landscape are exemplary in communicating the essential fact that the violence done to the environment is destructive and deadly for human beings as well. Their life in wartime does not belong only to human history but to the natural history, to the history of the earth. This is what the images of soldier corpses emerging from the mountains suggest: over time humans remain literally inscribed and buried in the landscape like any other natural element. This is a lesson that must be learned today, in the presence of a war that risks turning into atomic war and global warming that seem to jeopardize the survival of human life on earth.
War, what Leonardo da Vinci called “beastly madness,” highlights precisely the natural and animal elements of humans, their being subjected to the landscape which they claim to conquer. The emergence of anthropogenic residues from the mountains on the one hand makes them available for the historical archive and museum, on the other hand, it helps to recall the existence of an immemorial, geological, and biological past, which precedes the very formation of the human landscape, museums, and archives as we perceive them today. The bodies of the dead soldiers and their opposing uniforms before entering the historical archive belong to the mountain, the landscape, and its geological time that remains looming in the background.
The nuclear risk and the destruction of the planet had already emerged in the consciousness of human beings at the end of the first great world conflict. In those years the Trieste writer Italo Svevo wrote at the end of his novel Zeno’s Conscience, that human madness and disease would disappear from the earth only with the destruction of the planet made possible by a more powerful bomb than all those seen in the first world war:
Perhaps, through an unheard-of catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. When poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness. (437)
I published this long article in the new issue of Humanist Studies and the Digital Age, that contributes to a better understanding of the future of humanity and the humanities in the age of AI and new information technologies. The first part (“Is there a future?”), discusses the idea of the future in the context of Carl Schmitt’s vision for the spatial revolutions of modernity, and then the idea of Anthropocene, as a synonym for an environmental crisis endangering the very survival of humankind. From this point of view, the conquest of space and the colonization of Mars at the center of futuristic and technocratic visions appear to be an attempt to escape from human responsibilities on Earth. The second part (“AI and other hyperobjects”) discusses the extent of intellectual hubris expressed in computation, AI (Garvin Minsky e Ray Kurzweil), and the philosophy of computing and information (Eric Fredkin), involved in the elaboration of new theoretical assessments on the ultimate nature of reality. Their vision is then contrasted and made to interact with that of philosopher Timothy Morton. He has taken the perspective of global warming and the possibility of ecological catastrophe seriously, avoiding all the futuristic enthusiasms and instead emphasizing the radical nature of the transformations that humans experience in the present. In this perspective, AI becomes one of the “hyperobjects,” like the Internet or climate change, in which humans are immersed. Morton’s hyperobjects delineate an uncanny view of the future; this uncanniness is not related to the supernatural but to the environment.
The third part (“More-than-human-humanism”) further reflects on the “uncanniness” that human perceive in the encounters with the manifestations of hyperobjects. It also seeks to understand the human position in the face of the radical technological transformations induced by cybernetics and AI. This section discusses Anti-humanism, Transhumanism, and Posthumanism within the broader category of more-than-human thought, which seems to be a more appropriate term to clarify the possible misunderstandings induced by the word “posthuman” and “transhuman.” The central question is not to empower (Transhumanism) or disempower (Posthumanism) humans, but to see them in relation to what is not human, including other animals, the environment, and the machine. The analysis considers the works of Cary Wolfe, Jane Bennet, Bryant Levi, among others, and introduces ethical debates on cyborgs, robots, and Autonomous weapons systems (AWS). The fourth section (“Ethical Perspectives”) continues this inquiry, concentrating on the non-standard ethical theories of Luciano Floridi (Computer and Information Ethics) and David Gunkel (The question of the Machine). It examines the opportunity and feasibility of including in the discussion on the ethics of our time – characterized by the pervasiveness of AI – the notions of consciousness as theorized by Emmanuel Levinas’s Humanism of the Other and Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another.
Finally, the last section (“The time of the end?”) reflects on how the hyperobject, Anthropocene, re-establishes a sense of limits in human history and confirms the special responsibility of human beings, and supports the need for a more-than-human-humanism. The latter, in other words, means intertwining ourselves with a unique ecosystem which cannot be overlooked and which restores meaning to our relationship with the past, present, and future. The awareness of the current challenges of technology can and must express itself in different forms of resistance to the adverse effects of AI in our lives. The ethical approach based on the persisting role of human consciousness is essential, but it must be coupled with human decision-making and political action.
The complete article can be read and/or downloaded at this link.
Chissà se la luna di Kiev è bella come la luna di Roma, chissà se è la stessa o soltanto sua sorella… “Ma son sempre quella! – la luna protesta – non sono mica un berretto da notte sulla tua testa! Viaggiando quassù faccio lume a tutti quanti, dall’India al Perù, dal Tevere al Mar Morto, e i miei raggi viaggiano senza passaporto.
senza passaporto”.
The moon of Kiev by Gianni Rodari
Who knows if the moon of Kiev it is beautiful like the moon of Rome, who knows if it’s the same or just her sister …
“But I am always the same! – the moon protests – I’m not a nightcap on your head!
Traveling up here I light up everyone, from India to Peru, from the Tiber to the Dead Sea, and my rays travel without a passport.
without a passport “.
Transl. ML
*Image from Adobe Stock. Education license. Roman bridge and fortress of the Calahorra Tower, Cordoba. It is a bridge in the Historic center of Córdoba, Andalusia, southern Spain, built in the early 1st century BC across the Guadalquivir river.
Massimo Lollini 
