He has. It’s a novel about the writing of Lampedusa’s Gattopardo.

Mirella Radice was slender, with small shoulders, and a long soft neck with a fuzz of brown hair at the nape. He had found her quiet and submissive when Giò had first brought her to meet them two years ago but soon he had come to recognize the quick arched eyebrow, the slight lift of her lip when Giò spoke outrageously, and he had liked both the discretion and the dryness of her company. She had a habit of taking in a room as if from the side of her vision, and of turning her face slightly as one spoke so she might seem to be listening more intently. Her voice was low, her laugh deep and rich like a laugh heard from underwater. When she smiled, he felt old, but did not mind it, for there was such a purity of emotion in her. He could not recall a time when his own pleasure had been untainted by loss, by sadness. Mirella was educated, but uncultured, and it was this he and Licy had set to correct in her. No life can be lived deeply, Licy told her upon their first meeting, if it is lived outside of art. 

It is gorgeously written, with tenderness one does not expect from a man his age: its delicacy would surprise even in a sixty year old; and an insight into the nuances of the condition of the last of European aristocracy which one would never associate with a New World author. A tremendous amount of research has gone into the book — what kind of uniform did Lampedusa wear during the war? What kind of car did young Francesco drive? Somewhere within that seamless text details of the world described pass from established facts into facts imagined (what did they eat for lunch? how did the light shift in that instance?) and the reader is constantly asking himself: how did you know all this? How did you master it? What sources did you use? What books and films and diaries? How many decades of your life have gone into this work?

And the insight into the character of Lampedusa, his internal monologue, his states of mind astounds with its verisimilitude. Like Lampedusa’s novel was about his grandfather, and older man he had loved and known, so this, too, must be a portrait of someone the author has known and loved.

He must have slept. For he opened his eyes, his breathing tight, a sharp pain in his chest, and found he was alone now in the great quiet. He studied the red glow of the horizon through the open window, the crack of red light over the rooftops apocalyptic and terrifying. Was it morning again? He shifted his head on his pillow and saw his wife, asleep in a chair to one side of the window. It surprised him that he had not heard her breathing. Her chin was pressed to her chest, her hair in a waterfall around her, her beautiful deep black eyes closed to him. All at once he wished she would wake and look at him and he waited but she did not. He blinked and worked his mouth and tried to raise his hand but it would not obey him. He could see a book turned face down on her knee but he did not recognize it. It was black and the lettering on the spine was white and yet he could not make sense of it, as if it were written in a strange script, in a language he had known as a child and since lost. He swallowed painfully. A glass of water beside his bed darkened. When he glanced up the red vein of light beyond the rooftops of the city was diminishing and he squinted and tried to speak and then the light was seeping back downward, as if the day were abandoning him. A dark morning was rising, very beautiful. His eyes were wet and he tried to keep them open, tried to see the world for as long as he could. He listened to his wife breathe. The black book on his wife’s knee gleamed. How strange it was, he thought, that he did not know that book, what it contained.

Steven Price, Lampedusa

After his victory, Aristomenes dedicated his shield at the sanctuary of Delphi, where Pausanias claims to have seen it personally. ‘Upon it is an eagle with wings outspread so that they touch the rim.’ Aristomenes had lost that shield in the battle, and went to considerable effort to retrieve it. This was because the shield of a heavy infantryman was a bulky object, and the first thing that one discarded when running away. Aristomenes wanted to avoid the implication of cowardice, though contemporaries elsewhere in Greece were less bashful. The contemporary poet  Archilochus lost his shield as he fled a lost battle, and he remarked of the fact:   “Some Thracian now has the pleasure of owning the shield, I unwillingly threw into  the bushes. It was a perfectly good shield, but I had to save myself. Let it go. Why  care about that shield? I will get another just as good.”

Philip Matyszak, Sparta: Rise of a Warrior Nation

An unusually bright moon woke me up, shining in my face, and would not let me sleep. I dressed and went out for a walk. It was 4:30 in the morning and the world was white with frost. We walked out of the farm and up a steep incline to the crest of the nearby hill. The sky was totally clear, and stars shone bright and fat, and there was no wind at all. Here and there, far away, gleamed the lights of distant farms. Right in front of me hung Orion, the Great Hunter, and to the right The Pleiades, whom Old Norsemen compared to frost on fur.

The dog scented a fox and took off into the night. I cupped my hands to my ears to listen and slowly turned around on my heel. When you cup your hands like this, you hear exceptionally well. Any normal human hearing a distant fox cackling can more or less point out the direction from which the sound comes. But when you cup your hands to your ears, you can hear exactly both direction and distance — that fox was in that copse of trees, maybe a mile away. Slowly, as I turned, I took other sounds in: an owl hooting maybe a mile off; a car driving in a village 4 miles away — I heard it before I saw its long beam of light lighting up briefly some trees on a distant hill. And then the water gurgling in a stream maybe half a mile away.

As Sakaki tells it, several things have conspired against Kajin no Kigu, condemning it to oblivion. One was the sea change in the literary language of Japan: as the nation turned away from Kanbun (a form of classical Chinese) and Kanbun Kundoku (“Chinese writing Japanese reading”) to modern vernacular, texts written in the old format became inaccessible to the next generation.

But as high brow literary activity turned from using the old language to using the new, it itself began to shapeshift and become more like the literature heretofore written in vernacular: mainly, popular romances. After all, if you are going to write for the vernacular market, you surely must feel a strong urge to provide the kind of product it may want. Even if, like Natsume Soseki, you are conversant with the old style, when changing your language, you will attempt to adjust to its register.

I imagine this was an important issue in the minds of literary practitioners at the time, and was probably the motivation behind Tsubouchi Shoyo’s Shosetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel, 1885), a very influential piece of literary theory which, in effect, stated that human emotions and social mores are the only correct concern of the novel. In other words, as we would say today, to be a proper novel, a book must be a piece of chicklit. No more political novels, please.

Sadly, I do not read Kanbun with sufficient degree of fluency to read Kajin no Kigu for pleasure. But deathly bored and tired as I am of constantly having to read about love and relationships, I would gladly read a political novel. Especially since, as Sakaki tells it, the author of Kajin no Kigu, Shiba Shiro, had a far more nuanced view of the West and Japan than authors who came after him.

Most of the foreign exposure of Japanese authors (Natsume, Nagai) was extremely shallow and their views tended to focus on painting an imagined, monolithic, heterogeneous view of the shallow and materialistic West in opposition to the profound and spiritual and fundamentally mysterious Japan whose essence can only be grasped by natives, and only via special intuition. Unlike those clowns, Shiba Shiro actually did study abroad, not just dabble — he studied at Harvard and received a degree from Wharton. As my co-reader said, he was an actual person, not a tourist.

Sakaki, Atsuko. “Kajin no Kigū: The Meiji Political Novel and the Boundaries of Literature.” Monumenta Nipponica. Vol. 55, No.1, 2000, pp. 83–108

Among a set of Hittite tablets entitled “The Deeds of Suppiluliuma as told by his son Mursilis II”, one recounts Ankhesenamen’s frantic letter.

The letter is extraordinary. The queen of Egypt writes to Egypt’s traditional enemy, the Hittites, and says that she is afraid and wants to marry a Hittite prince and make him king of Egypt. Nothing like this had ever happened in Egypt.

The queen of Egypt, who was Dahamunzu sent a messenger to my father and wrote to him thus: “my husband died. A son I have not. But to thee, they say, the sons are many. If thou wouldst give me one son of thine, he would become my husband. Never shall I pick out a servant of mine and make him my husband! … I am afraid!

Ankhesamun, Tutenkhamen’s teenage widow, was pressured to marry her husband’s elderly vizier, Ay, so that he could assume the throne. A teenager’s natural revulsion towards elderly men aside, I would be afraid to marry that mug, too.

The fullest explanation of the theology of the new religion comes from a hymn carved on the walls of several tombs at Amarna. The most elaborate version is incorporated in the west wall of the tomb of Aye, a favorite courtier of Akhenaten. All indications are that Akhenaten himself composed it. Although written centuries before the Old Testament, it has a similar tone. In fact, scholars find resemblances to Psalm 104.

Splendid you rise in heavens lightland,
O living Aten, creator of life!

When you have dawned in eastern lightland,
You fill every land with your beauty.

Your are beauteous, great, radiant,
High over every land;

Your rays embrace the lands,
To the limit of all that you made.

Reign Re, you reach their limits,
You bend them (for) the sons whom you love;

Though you are far, your rays are on earth,
Though one sees you, your strides are unseen . . .

How many are your deeds,
Though hidden from sight,

O Sole God beside whom there is none!
You made the earth as you wished, you alone,

All peoples, herds, and flocks:
All upon earth that walk on legs,
All on high that fly on wings,
The lands ofKhor and Kush,
The land of Egypt.

You set up every man in his place,
You supply their needs;

Everyone has his food,
His lifetime is counted.

Their tongues differ in speech,
Their skins are distinct,
For you distinguished the peoples . . .

You are in my heart,
There is no other who knows you,
Only your son, Nefer-khepru-re, Sole one of Re,
Whom you have taught your ways and might.

• 

• 

Marfan syndrome is a rare multi-systemic genetic disorder that affects the connective tissue. Those with the condition tend to be tall and thin, with long arms, legs, fingers, and toes. They also typically have overly-flexible joints and scoliosis.

I think the answer is a psychological one. But how do you confirm a psychological theory about someone who has been dead for 3,000 years? I thought that if I talked to people with Marfan’s syndrome I might see how it affected their lives. How did they feel growing up different? Did they feel left out? Were they shunned? A geneticist colleague 13 working on Marfan’s syndrome suggested I talk to a New York chapter of people with the syndrome. I called the organizer of the group, Julie Kurnitz, to see if I could attend their meeting and try out my theory on them. I would give a brief slide lecture about Akhenaten and ask for the group’s reactions.

Most of the people who attended the meeting were women, many would blend in with any crowd; their physical characteristics were not extreme. But some could have been sisters of Akhenaten. Julie has classic Marfan features; she is tall with an elongated chin, narrow eyes, long thin arms, fingers, and toes, unusual features but not freakish. If anything, Julie is a handsome woman. Even before talking with the group, I revised my view of Akhenaten: he wasn’t a freak. You can look different without looking freakish. None of the women in the group had physical features that were shocking.

Julie introduced me to the group and I began talking about Akhenaten and showing slides. After the second slide, I began to hear a lot of “Yups,” and “Wows.” As I continued with slides of the elongated hands and feet of the royal family, there were even more exclamations—”Marfan toes!” They had found a kinsman from ancient Egypt. After my talk I asked if any of the women had been treated differently when they were growing up, felt left out, had been shunned. And if so, how they had reacted. One woman said as a child she was always told to stand in the back to hide her long hands when a family photo was taken. Another young woman with close-cut hair and wire-rimmed glasses told a similar story and then provided the insight I was looking for. She said she rebelled and did everything she could to accentuate her appearance, wore capes and strange clothing and bizarre makeup. Who knows what she would have done had she been king of Egypt. 

Bob Brier, The Death of Tutankhamun

You do have to wonder. After 7 languages, 8 countries on three continents, a career in three professions, a study of 7 art forms, and a vast reading in science, philosophy, history, economics, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, game theory, finance — is such a one condemned to ever being bored by others?

There is a secret society of those who know. And then there is everyone else. There is not much point talking about it to those who don’t know, because… they don’t know. And if you tell them, they will not believe you.

What use is to speak Polish and go out of your way to meet Polish ladies, when all you get from them is a garbled version of California fashions? Healthy diets, natural medicine, mother goddess, reiki and yoga, holidaying in Goa and Thailand, vegetarianism. They go to university and study languages so that they can learn all this garbage not very well. What a waste of brain.