Wednesday
Morning Read
¶ Decameron X, ix, the penultimate story in the collection, is the first to strike me as thoroughly appropriate reading material for children. Messer Torello of Pavia (a man of wealth but not an aristocrat) and Saladin (touring the West, disguised as a Cypriot merchant, in order to take the measure of his impending adversaries in the Third Crusade), indulge in an orgy of potlatch. The nature of the generosity that motivates their barrage of gift-giving strikes us as oddly impersonal at first, only to become oddly personal: the men become dear friends because they’ve given each other so many lovely presents.
So Saladin enfolded him tenderly in his arms, kissed him, and, weeping copiously, bid him God-speed and withdrew.
It’s almost creepy. Torello is transported back to his native Pavia on a wondrous bed, but instead of materializing in his town house it shows up in the cathedral!
The most interesting detail is Saladin’s recognition that Torello, although a “knight” (cavalier), is “no prince, but a private citizen” (cittadino e non signore). My Italian text glosses this distinction for modern readers as “un privato, non un feudatorio.” By Boccaccio’s day, the replacement by the bourgeoisie of the aristocracy was already well underway.
¶ Clive James is extremely interesting about Sigmund Freud: how Freud’s intensely secular outlook blinded him to the horrific potential of Nazism.
He never grasped that Nazi destructiveness was a complete mind in itself. Surely he was the victim of his own poetry, which was so vivid that he took it to be a map of reality. From the realm of the human spirit he had banished God and the Devil, and replaced them with a family of contending deities bearing proud Greek names. They were household gods: aided by judicious therapy, they would one way or another always reach an accommodation, in a world where people like his old sisters, even if they were not happy, would die in bed. But the Devil came back. The Devil had never been away.
James is almost scathing about “Thanatos,” the supposed death-wish.
Thanatos was no gentleman, and he came not to rescue minds from their torments, but to torment bodies until minds collapsed. Thanatos was a raving maniac, not a mental principle. How was it that Freud, of all people, could not foresee this?
James’s answer to that question is that Freud’s focus was too fixed upon the individual ego: “The real psychodrama was too big for him to see.”