No. 39 - Becoming ourselves
As a tribute to Fulvio Papi, a strict scholar of Antonio Banfi, a philosopher who was always attentive to the educational aspects of the relationship between life and culture and a long-standing contributor to Paideutika, the Editorial Board dedicates this issue to the theme "Becoming ourselves".
In one of his last works, La sapienza moderna (Ibis, 2020), Papi collected fragments of philosophers and writers followed by brief reflections, in a methodological attempt to show how 'modern wisdom' cannot be anything other than the posing of a question to the reader. No answers, then, and no meddling, but the 'obstinate' pursuit - to use a term dear to him - of questioning.
The extract chosen here, whose title is re-proposed as the subject of the call and whose protagonist is also Marguerite Yourcenar, can be fruitfully addressed as an educational and formative issue, generating studies and considerations on the ages of life ranging from adolescence to ageing, on the symbols and signs that underpin them, on the meanings of the experiences that characterise them, on memories and their relationship with the thought of the end. But the structure of Papi's reasoning also suggests, so to speak, 'methodological' indications on what is the relationship between the subject in the making and its 'fundamental sources', on the function of reading as a gesture that calls into question one's subjective responsibility and awareness, on the interiority that feeds itself, despite itself or intentionally, on the living materiality of knowledge.
The breadth of the possibilities of analysis thus seemed to us the best way to enhance the richness of Papi's proposal in the time to come.
"'As adolescents, when the possibilities all at once urge us on, making us only regret having to choose, these characters from the past, these possibilities that have materialised, appear to us, I dare say, as guideposts along the roads we will or will not take. In them we do not worship symbols, but signs. Then, as life has both developed us and stripped us - developed in the photographic sense of the word, stripped in the wine sense, stripped of all that is other than ourselves, developed in all that we are given to be - when we begin to know, even to a rough approximation, how we will react to pleasure, and pain, and truths, we grow weary of ourselves. Why is it that we are not given to wasting more than one life? By dint of knowing the exact number of our gold teeth, the amount of our annuities, if we have any, and the name of those diseases that can lead us to death, by dint of wandering, like a tourist travelling out of boredom, in this well-categorised museum that is ourselves, we end up feeling uncomfortable in these places of motionless enchantments, galleries, ruins, libraries, icy waters, mirrors à la Mallarmé, springs where, slowly, Narcissus petrified himself. And we only love the living, because they, at least, give us the illusion of change'.
(Marguerite Yourcenar, Pellegrina e straniera (1989), it. tr. Elena Giovannelli, Turin, Einaudi, 1990).
The worst, I think, when the measure of time begins to arouse curiosity and respect, at least among our few remaining friends, is to be crouched in one's own corner while thousands of images flow by as if in our sight, and each of them has its own little theatre around it to remind us that we too had our part in it, always enthusiastic even in the eventual sadness. One knows that even to reread a poem is to slip into apparitions of a time that are now like mute shadows. And one also knows that others will never read those poems of which they may know the name of their author'”.
Fulvio Papi, La sapienza moderna, Como-Pavia, Ibis, 2022, pp. 46-47.
Keywords: memory, interiority, reading, autobiography, personality shaping.
Publication: beginning of May 2024
Submissions deadline: December 10th 2023
Journal approval: within January 10th 2024
First peer review’s outcome: within February 20th 2024
