STORIES OF REBIRTH
STORIES OF REBIRTH
#4 REINALDO ARENAS, BEFORE NIGHT FALLS
This wonderful autobiography ofthe great Cuban intellectual Reinaldo Arenas tells us what it means to live inCuba, being an homosexual and writer, before and after the Revolution.
Arenas never gave up fighting for his freedom and he is remembered as an example of courage, as he was persecuted by the regime and by diseases until the end of his days.
A heartrending book, full of emotions, a story of dreams and fears, of passions and disappointments. A great hymn to friendship and freedom, to the hope of a country free from the oppression of dictatorship:
“I urge theCuban people in exile, as the inhabitants of the Island, to continue to fightfor freedom. My message is not pessimistic, it is a message of struggle and hope… ”
Reinaldo Arenas, Prima che sia notte
Guanda editore
STORIES OF REBIRTH
#3 Paolo Barozzi, PEGGY GUGGENHEIM
Over many decades, many stories and legends have flourished on Peggy Guggenheim and all of them have helped to strengthen the myth of an eccentric and avant-garde lady, a woman of unabashed manners.
However, few evidences offer us an affectionate and nostalgic portrait of the famous American collector like the one written by Paolo Barozzi, a sincere friend and confidant. First of all, he celebrates Peggy’s love for Venice, which is the real muse of the famous collection of the greatest work of art of the last century. It is in this city, in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, that the vulnerability and romance of a woman perpetually in search of talent and passion is revealed, a woman who lives with the constant remorse of not having family attitude and who feels alive only among her friends,mainly artists. Thanks to the author, we learn as well to see in her that fragilehumanity that unites us all and that goes beyond the ostentatious appearances of an eternal high-class bohemian.
“… Because Peggy Guggenheim, the real one, the one that she never revealed, perhaps not even to herself, because of hershyness, was a single woman despite countless flirts; a hopelessly romantic woman… in the end she was very vulnerable and puritan, who defended herself fromthe brutality of life adopting unscrupulous attitudes and sometimes even resorting to alcohol … ”
Paolo Barozzi, Peggy Guggenheim –A woman, a collection, Venice
Campanotto Rifili Editore
STORIES OF REBIRTH
#2 Michele C. Del Re, il segreto del giardino del sogno
There is a garden beyond gardens, an archetype that lives through the ages of the world and blooms in our unconscious as a Garden of Dreams. It is ‘the place of expectation, magic and joy of life and it needs to be constantly cultivated.
The journey through the ideal gardens of the world opens us to the knowledge of ancient and contrasting symbolisms that flourish in our dreams and tell us about life,death and Rebirth in the primordial secret garden. All this is expressed in the centuries through different forms of organisation and care of the garden, from the small blooming windowsill to the wheat fields. Everything expresses the vision of our inner garden and of our desire for happiness.
“The windowsill. Even there the beautiful blooms, life [blooms]. What I admire is the faith of those seedlings … in spite of everything, the seedlings want to liveand grow. And so here I live in that remnant of garden and I try to believe in life too… even the sill and the backrest are inside our garden of dreams… "
Michele C.del Re, Il segreto del giardino del sogno ("The secretof the garden of dreams", ndt)
Angelo Pontecorboli editore, Firenze
STORIES OF REBIRTH
#1 BRUNO MUNARI, DISEGNARE UN ALBERO
Sometimes a little encouragement is enough to discover new dimensions of creativity; a well-directed stimulus - especially when it comes from a great master of design and a writer - can open up to new expression possibilities while blurring our fears: who among us has not ever wished, at least once as a child, to excel in drawing, to be able to put on paper your own imagination and emotions? A discovery that allows us to realise our ancient, though small, fantasies with simple important gestures: a true Rebirth.
“Perfection, says an old Eastern saying, is beautiful but also stupid: you have to know it but also to break it. I think that now it will be clear for you how to draw a tree, and for this reason you must not follow blindly what I showed you; if you know the rule you can draw the tree as you wish and it can be completely different from the ones you have seen in this book … Then, above all, teach it to others. ”
Bruno Munari, Disegnare un albero (How to draw a tree)
Edizioni Corraini
STORIES OF REBIRTH
#AMOUR: OSCAR WILDE, DE PROFUNDIS
February,the month of love! Give yourself a special moment, let yourself be carried awayby the absolute love as in great masters’ thoughts.
Can a letter from a wounded andembittered heart become a universal literary classic? Yes of course, if theauthor is Oscar Wilde!
"... Love is powered by imagination, so we become wiser than we know,better than we feel, nobler than we are: so we can see life as a whole: that’show, and how only we can understand others in their true and ideal relations.Only what is noble and nobly conceived can feed Love. But anything can feed Hate."
OscarWilde, De Profundis
Oscar Mondadori (Italian edition)
STORIES OF REBIRTH
#amour: Plutarco, Sull'amore
February,the month of love! Give yourself a special moment, let yourself be carried awayby the absolute love as in great masters’ thoughts.
The funny ambiguities of love in Plutarch’s Greece: daily adventures underthe wings of the almighty Eros.
"... The same impression you have made me a little while ago: I sawyou trying to drag Eros one towards the quarters of the men, the other towardsthose of the women. But you all agreed to consider it a supreme, divine good;and I told myself that it's not surprising that this passion has so much powerand such a high regard, when even people who would have every reason to rejectit and to hold it back, wherever it comes from, rather feed it and praise itwithin themselves. "
Plutarch, On love
Ed. Adelphi (Italian edition)
STORIES OF REBIRTH
#Amour: Jarry, L'amore assoluto
February, the month of love! Give yourself a special moment, let yourself be carried away ny the absolute love as in great masters' thoughts.
Absolute love and madness, a daring and shocking transfiguration of the Genesis and of the divine word.
"…And in the evening they metagain, while the notary was cradling the digestive hours, as he used to do inhis secluded study until dawn, equipped with a flask of blond alcohol, thewarble of the saw between the mahogany wood arabesques that he kills andreanimates, Emmanuel and Varia, without a word of explanation or transition. If their mouths clung, like a bug to his fellow on the other side of a mirror, itwas to hold - to anywhere else - the fall of the bodies into a swoon. And iftheir arms encircled the circumnavigation of their caresses, it was to tightenthe improbability of their presences gathered up until the condensation of thereal, which does not escape. They followed the complicit whim of the Bird’scoil, with a beak full of needles, of the notary, to what they had not dared,suggested by the sound of the sea between the two halves of their limestone bed."
Alfred Jarry,L’amour absolu (Absolute love)
Ed. Adelphi (Italian edition)
STORIES OF REBIRTH
#AMOUR: Plato, SYMPOSIUM
February, the month of love! Give yourself a special moment, let yourself be carried away by the absolute love as in great masters’ thoughts
HOW TO LOVE IN FULL HARMONY? LOVE IS CREATING, IS "GIVING BIRTH" IN THE BEAUTIFUL.
LOVE IS THE DEMON THAT SEEKS TO OWN GOOD FOREVER.
“…The object (love, n.d.r.) which they have in view is birth in beauty, whether of body or soul.' '… 'I mean to say, that all men are bringing to the birth in their bodies and in their souls. There is a certain age at which human nature is desirous of procreation—procreation which must be in beauty and not in deformity; and this procreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine thing; for conception and generation are an immortal principle in the mortal creature, and in the inharmonious they can never be. But the deformed is always inharmonious with the divine, and the beautiful harmonious.”
PLATO, Symposium