Weeks spent reading for exams, alone. I did not want to see anybody, and I did not let anybody see me. I worked in the attic, feverishly, not because of what professors would expect me to know, but because of the fields of darkness I discovered ahead of me and surrounding me. For every page I studied, I found I craved further pages, further books, further ascents. But the more I studied, the deeper I was plunged in despair. In silence, I worked on. ‘They all fall defeated by the breadth of science; they all lament the impotence of the human mind when confronted with the truth scattered throughout thousands of books and realms; and they all end bewailing the bankruptcy of the encyclopaedic. I have sworn to become a hero of ethics; why not also a hero of knowledge? Why not turn myself into a masterpiece? Why not make my spiritual life the mirror of the age? I should not be daunted by the failures of my forerunners; their work was passionate, disorganised, impetuous. A heroic spiritual life, not one of rhetorical exaltation, or stultifying study, but rather a life of calm, method, discipline. I have been influenced far too much by the bankruptcy of Papini’s Universalism. I must shake off unbelief. Once I have achieved the asceticism of ethics, why should I not also master the asceticism of universal erudition? Of course, it is not possible to master everything; but it is possible to gather and assimilate the essence of human genius. I will require five, ten, fifty years. And then I will be able to say: I have recreated myself, through assiduous labour, toiling in obscurity; I have transcended my species, because in my soul and in my mind are gathered together all the fruits of human labour; from whose seeds will grow forests, fields of crops, gardens.’
I redoubled my efforts. I received nobody; I desired to see nobody. I woke at sunrise, and on long strips of paper I outlined everything I needed to know; day by day the strips grew more and more numerous. But I did not despair. ‘Any crisis must be resolved through hard work. No obstacle can withstand the power of determined, tireless, calm work. Those who have fallen were weak. I must attain my goal. I will succeed, without praise, without glory, without special gifts. Thoughts of madness and death may frighten the mediocre. But not me!’
I discovered my gaps: mathematics, Greek, Hebrew, Slavonic, Sanskrit. I drew up a schedule for myself and, labouring in obscurity, hidden away in a city of factories, I followed it day after day. I studied geometry, Euclid’s Elements in the Italian translation by Enriques. I experienced shivers of delight when deciphering early thinking directly from the source. I gnawed my lips because I was unable to grasp Theon of Smyrna’s Expositio rerum mathematicarum ad legendum Platonem utilium. For two whole days and nights I pored over Plato’s Timaeus; and then I returned to Theon after filling with notes the margins of several pages on the textbook on the history of the ancient sciences that Mieli had given me. To gain an even better understanding, I read Plutarch (Quaestiones conviviales, VIII, 2 and De animae procreatione in Timaeo) and I plunged into the first part of Gino Loria’s voluminous Le scienze esatte nell’antica Grecia. Evenings, I interrupted my work on geometry to start learning Hebrew. I had a grammar and a dictionary. My eyes watered as they strained over the thick letters speckled with dots. The work was hard, because I laboured alone, without asking for help. ‘The only way to avoid being accused of plagiarizing Giovanni Papini is to surpass him, by attaining universal knowledge. All the gentlemen who claim that knowledge is immense are wrong; it is only immense because they study it for only a few hours a day, cursorily, or because they seek the easiness of depth. But before gaining depth, knowledge must have breadth.’ So I told myself and I worked. I ordained for myself countless rules, from which I did not stray: to study only the essentials, the sources; not to share my discoveries with anyone else; to publish only ideas extraneous to my experiences, until my own thinking was completely matured.
The exams came and went. My friends had become importunate; they would not leave me in peace. After Nişka’s first visit, my eyes strayed from my Hebrew text, forgetting the meaning of the characters; I confused maqqef with pasek, and I mixed up the Segolta with the Telisa qetanna accent. The simplest of verbs seemed impossible to commit to memory, particularly the Hifil and Hitpael forms. After an hour of confusion, I felt an emptiness inside my skull and then the sensation that I was a stranger. I have forgotten everything else that happened that night. In the morning I awoke with a clear head. ‘It can’t have been tiredness. I am incapable of being tired. The memory lapse struck me because of the strain, nearsightedness, and the characters.’ I moved my hour of Hebrew to the mornings. Thitherto I had studied Sanskrit in the morning, using a textbook by Fumi. It took me several days to grasp the eight classes of consonants. I enthusiastically deciphered the Mahabharata: ‘Asidraya Nalo nama Virasen asuto bali upapanno gunairistai.’ (‘I was a powerful king, by the name of Nalo, son of Virasen.’)
After day ten, I realised that I could not learn two oriental languages simultaneously, singlehandedly. I had to choose. But I did not have the courage to part with either of them. So I set aside both and began to study Persian from the book by De Martino. I spent an entire afternoon pacing up and down the attic, studying the alphabet: elif, bey, pey, tey, sey, gim, tim, hey. On pieces of paper I practiced writing them in their isolated, initial, medial, and final forms. My eyes strained to tell the difference between the initial and the medial zad. I spent an hour studying Ghiaf, made up of two complicated signs that were painful to memorise. That night, completely exhausted, I thumbed through the textbook and realised I still had to learn the vowels and diphthongs. The four izafet sent me into despair. I closed the book and wrote in my Diary: ‘For the time being, I am abandoning my study of the oriental languages, and will make do with translated texts. This is not a defeat, but rather an experience. There are other essentials I must first assimilate. I will start Greek again.’
The next morning I woke up with heavy limbs. I gazed out at the autumn through the little window. ‘If I don’t get up now, when I command myself to, I’ll lose all the self-confidence I’ve built up over the past four weeks of work and solitude.’ I winced, climbed out of bed in a stupor, washed, and sat down at my table. I was dissatisfied with this act of will. ‘Why am I so tired?’ I stopped feeling tired. I picked up an unread book by Simmel. ‘Why read Simmel instead of starting over with Ancient Greek?’ I opened my Greek grammar and my vocabulary notebook. I studied; and I was dissatisfied. ‘Why did I sleep for eight hours, rather than four? Why did I give up Hebrew? Why didn’t I slap myself in the face when I caught myself looking out my window at the autumn?’ Why do I allow myself to be dominated by the thought that I will fail, like Papini? Why do I allow myself the self-indulgent consolation of failure? And why am I wasting time thinking about all of this, now?’
With clawed fingers I pulled my hair out. I wept with fury. I pictured myself as an adolescent once more, tortured by the same struggles with autumn, nostalgia, and weakness. ‘I won’t have made any progress, if I am still depressed’, I yelled at myself. ‘Enough! Enough! I’m going mad!’ And again the thought: ‘A reason to sleep eight hours and not study Hebrew.’ I was crying. ‘Crying is stupid and enervating. It won’t solve anything.’ I stopped crying and rested my eyes. ‘I won’t accomplish anything heroic without shedding a few tears.’ I soothed my eyes with the autumn outside. I regained my composure. I was sad, sad, in despair. ‘This too shall pass, this too shall pass.’
I realised that I still needed to understand one element vital to my life’s work, the achievement of a heroic life: how much to demand of my will. I was reminded of the discussion at the hermitage. What if God did not want to bestow his grace upon me? The thought made me even more determined. ‘I will succeed without God!’ And I worked day after day, night after night.
One night I felt overcome with exhaustion. My whole body was heavy and felt alien to me, and my joints ached. I was pale, I had dark rings around my eyes and inflamed eyelids. My forehead looked odd to me. I looked at my hands on my desk, and did not recognize them. I was struck with terror: ‘What if I am going mad?’ I grimaced: ‘This thought is just a temptation to convince me to come down from the attic and sleep for eight hours.’ I felt ever more acutely the confusion that was taking hold of my brain and soul. I found myself trembling. Then, all at once, I lost all awareness of why I was in an attic full of books. ‘Who am I?’ I smiled. ‘So this is mental overexertion’, I answered, ‘I don’t believe in mental overexertion.’ Whose voice said that? I did not recognize the words, I did not understand the meaning of the word in. ‘I must go to bed now; all this will pass.’ The thought came to me, ‘To sleep before the appointed time is to accept defeat. Fatigue and the feeling of losing consciousness are mere temptations.’ In terror, I listened to the dialogue between the voices within me.
I was tired because I accepted the idea of being tired. I needed to shout out: ‘Tiredness doesn’t exist! Shout it loud!’
I was shaking, with my arms resting on the table.
‘Tiredness does not exist!’
‘That’s stupid; who was that shouting?’
‘I was!’
‘Who am I?’
‘What if I have gone mad?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I’m going to bed.’
‘I don’t have the will! Yes I do!’
Vortices of cold pierced my ears, rushed inside my brain. I felt the pain only for an instant; and then a feeling of utter faintness. And I wondered, ‘What does chair mean?’
‘Pray to God.’
‘God doesn’t exist.’
‘What if I’m the devil?’
‘Stop that! I’ll go mad!’
‘I’m going to bed!’
‘If I go to bed, it means I’m ill.’
‘Maybe I have gone mad?’
‘Oh God! Oh God!’
‘Calm down! Calm your nerves!’
I commanded myself, but my flesh no longer served as a vehicle for my will. I was in a state of confusion. I contemplated death, and insanity. ‘What if I never feel normal again? What if I stay like this for the rest of my life?’ I yanked my hair out in desperation. I began to pray, on my knees, with my palms pressed together: ‘Oh Lord! Oh Lord! Oh Lord!’
I could neither think nor feel the word Lord! I uttered it, but it was voided of meaning. One thought lacerated me: ‘I cannot pray because I am the devil!…’ I wanted to laugh: ‘The devil! The devil!’
I slept fitfully, after smothering myself with a pillow. I woke at sunrise. Everything had faded away. I reread the lines in my Diary. I added: ‘Merely a scare. Next time, more discipline required. Today I will sleep a bit longer; but I will not go downstairs. God may or may not exist. I do exist!’