Sunday

Southbank rainforest walk. Palms and weeping figs.


Tipuana tipu. UQ Lakes.

I've been reading Manzoni's 'The Betrothed' (I promessi sposi). Now in retrospect, it feels like the lives of the saints. But it is a delight to read. From the very first event, where the priest Don Abbondio is accosted by two bravoes and we have three pages quoting the various edicts by which these bravoes are to be discouraged.

"Hearing such bold and confident words from so great a noble, and such orders going with them, one would be very much inclined to think that all the bravoies disappeared for ever at their very sound. But the evidence of a nobleman no less authoritatative and no less endowed with titles obliges us to believe quite the contrary. ...

And wherever he touches on history there is always this delicate irony. Fantastic stuff. A most extraordinary book: we go from character to character with interludes of beautifully ironic history - history, which has been deeply internalised and now comes out as natural conversation. And it's always a conversation with you, the reader. And it's a tale of terrible times: immense lawlessness, war, famine and pestilence, encompassed in a tale of Milan and its environs from 1628 to 1630.

"The people had tried to create abundance by sacking and burning, the government was trying to maintain it be the gallows and the rope. Such means were linked to each other, but the reader can see how little they had to do with the ends; and in a moment he will see just what avail they wre to attain them. It is easy to see, and not uninteresting to observe, how there was a necessary connexion between these measures; each was an inevitable consequence of its predecessor, and all a result of the first decree which fixed the price of bread so far from its real price - from the price, that is, that would have resulted naturally from the relation between supply and demand. .... But then, as the consequences gradually began to be felt, it became the duty of those responsible to come to the relief of each edict with a law forbidding people to do what they had been encouraged to do by the preceding law."

"Man's activity is limited; and the more of it is put into giving orders, the less goes into carrying them out. What goes into the sleeves cannot go into the gussets."