HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CESARE PAVESE
born September 9, 1908
Cesare Pavese
(Tough) love from a Poet
"Before being shrewd about by others, you must learn to be shrewd with yourself. There is an art in so arranging things
that the sin we commit becomes
virtuous to our conscience.
Any woman can teach you that art."
December 7
"There is something even sadder than falling short of one's own ideals: to have realized them."
December 18
"And in this present year my long and secret shame has been straightened out. In that other year, 1934, there was a 13th August. Yet I am still alive. Isn't it a miracle?"
December 30, 1934
–Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living
The story of CESARE PAVESE is the old story of unripe genius. Rimbaud became an arms dealer and a mercenary, a poetic and spiritual suicide. As for Pavese, he ended his existence pure and simple by suicide of his body for obscure and frivolous reasons, for a woman or worse: many. His lucid and stoic voice still rustles in This Business of Living , a collection of thoughts for himself which are in fact for us.
Cesare, hear us out: suicide is the ultimate violence, a perverse twist, a force of destruction that one refuses to exert on the other but inflicts on oneself, a self-assassination.
Emotional entanglement is hell. In the fire of lust, in the unconscious and childish passions which possess the poet, we lose so many brothers and sisters in Poetry, and the world, so many possibilities of beauty and elevation.
Revue {R} mourns you, Cesare, and watches the horizon of your return in a life enduring, wise, peaceful: imperial.
Are you eternal yet? Your voice has fallen silent.
Happy birthday, Brother.