Calasso

Roberto Calasso (Photo by Louis Monie)

I see Roberto Calasso died recently (“Roberto Calasso, Renaissance Man of Letters, Dies at 80,” The New York Times, July 30,2021). I know of his work only indirectly through a wonderful review-essay by Charles Simic, titled “Paradise Lost" (The New York Review of Books, September 20, 2001; re-titled "Literature and the Gods: Roberto Calasso," in Simic’s 2015 collection The Life of Images). 

In his piece, Simic describes Calasso’s re-creation of the myth of Persephone, the goddess of fertility who was carried off into the underworld by Hades. Normally, I have little patience for this sort of thing – it’s too unreal. But the meaning Simic extracts from it is fascinating: 

Our precarious life, fleeting and irreplaceable, has another dimension. That which exists once and only once is beautiful, the myths keep telling us. It is precisely because we are mortal beings that things have a significance and an intense presence at times.

The linking of aesthetics and mortality seems to me inspired! It’s why I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art. Life is transient. We must try to capture it, preserve it, before it disappears.