The rare atoms of happiness and the "heartbeat" needed to evoke them. About Guido Ceronetti

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Only a few travelers reach the hilltop town of Cetona in late October, today one of Umbria's most fashionable villages, not only because some of Italy's grandees own their summer residences here, villas shaded by gardens. However, Cetona's most important and secretive resident, Guido Ceronetti , was not at home in these. In the ancient East, a being like him would have been venerated as a hakim, a sage, who combined the professions of thinker and doctor. Ceronetti himself, regarding his spiritual position, placed himself somewhere in the space "that separates Buddha from Émile Littré." For him, "the problem of salvation (of true wisdom)" consisted in emptying himself, even if he did nothing more than follow his "libertine curiosities," while being perfectly aware that "God can only come to an empty heart, concentrated within him, not to a heart filled with dictionaries." But perhaps not even this description of his intellectual position provides an answer to the question of who Guido Ceronetti was.

Another attempt at an answer might sound disconcerting: Ceronetti was an essayist and novelist, a playwright and puppeteer, a Christian, a Buddhist, or a Taoist (depending on the time). He was an ascetic, a vegetarian, and a fortune teller, an organist, a mystic, and a Gnostic, a man for women, and a sarcastic chronicler of cultural and political events. He was a tea master, an exegete of Old Testament texts, and a misanthrope impeded by his veneration of women. A sworn enemy of all vulgarity and a tireless scourge of the technocratic demon, surely no other thinker since Cioran was so saddened and fascinated by the state of human abandonment in our times. Like Chekhov, Ceronetti could also be defined as "a genius of friendship." He was a man capable of loving, a man who, before his lectern, followed with inexhaustible dedication the paths of Eastern and Western wisdom, tirelessly searching for the divine core in the human spirit.

Born in Turin in 1927 – his mother was a cashier in a small cinema, his father ran a craft business – he sought intellectual space outside the confines of his “obsessive family” as a child, a space he found in books and, from the mid-1950s onwards, in the lessons of an elderly rabbi whose wife and children, while fleeing to Italy, were snatched from a train by the Gestapo at the Brenner Pass and shortly thereafter murdered in a concentration camp. This bearded Jew, so cruelly dealt by fate yet steadfast in his faith, taught his young student ancient Hebrew, a language Ceronetti studied throughout his life to confront the "verbal tumult" and "desperate clarity" of Ecclesiastes, which, along with the Psalms, the Book of Job, Isaiah, and the Song of Songs, he would translate into Italian, providing his translations with illuminating commentaries, for which his readers can never thank him enough. Perhaps no other biblical exegete has conveyed the disturbing texts of the Old Testament so penetratingly, in their authoritative and painful force.

When, at nearly ninety, Ceronetti looked back on his decades of studying biblical texts, he saw them as one of the duels described by Joseph Conrad. His final victory was due to a peculiar gift: he recognized more than others the magical power of the poetic word, a power inseparable from sound. Like the author of the Song of Songs, Ceronetti was searching for that healing sound of language, its mysterious vibration, a sound he also traced in painting, architecture, and cinema. All the phenomena to which he passionately dedicated himself, such as the paintings of Grünewald or Rembrandt, the poetry of Baudelaire or Cavafy, the odes of Horace, or the manifestations of love, he explored in search of that sound that could perhaps be described as the "sound of the heart." He knew that only the "right tone" possesses something incorruptible, that it alone connects to the vein of life .

While Dante's infernal tours, alongside Virgil, were as thrilling as crossing an Indian circus tent, Ceronetti's Hell was a concrete plain dominated by technology, filled with carbon monoxide, flooded with industrial wastewater, and inhabited by dead souls. On his journey, spanning nearly nine decades, he traversed "the realm of evil," where language served as his only exorcism against fire and demons. Nothing was safe from the penetrating gaze of this scholar who emerged from the world of mandrakes, who subsisted on green tea and barley grains, and who quickly recognized that "the most dangerous weapon ever invented is man." After the disappearance of wild beasts and the swept away of the terrors of heaven—relatively pleasant distractions, in his view—the only remaining source of terror in the world is man. In metropolises, Ceronetti writes, this terror is so strong that it transforms them into monstrous fortresses of fear.

"Gellius says that temperance saved Socrates from the Athenian plague, through abstinence and a well-ordered life." Perhaps following the philosopher's example, Ceronetti also protected himself from the evils of our time with temperance and abstinence. His motto was: "Eat like an ant and defecate like an elephant"—not only for physical reasons, but also for metaphysical ones. Yet, this Italian hakim did not want to eliminate anything humanly beautiful and fairytale-like that still remains in the world, for although he believed that sleepwalking humanity was building its own funeral pyre, he believed in happiness; yes, he was a collector of those rare atoms of happiness that have the power to make our lives shine.

“Drink tea and don't despair!” Among the apples and pears, the grapes and the red flowers in the fruit basket I had prepared for Guido Ceronetti and carried in the October rain through a dark alley in Cetona to the library of his apartment, lay a sachet of Japan Kamairi—First Flush, an allusion to one of his Tea Thoughts: “In the deep mental regions, where thought contemplates the Way, where the sky bends until it circumscribes with its invisible dance our painful effort to penetrate it, the aroma of tea is perceived above all, as an announcement that heaven is near.” Throughout his life, Guido Ceronetti was tied to the star of the spirit, which even that rainy day shone in his myopic eyes, whose clarity was in no way clouded by age. He once translated a phrase by Kafka, which states that man has two escape routes: suicide or the spirit. "From the world, by force or by gentleness, one can still escape." Anyone who has read Ceronetti's books knows that, no matter how much God burdened him with pain and fear, he would never have chosen the first path, because it violates the sacred, and the sacred is frightening. "But also its absence, even the desecrated world, without rules, without prohibitions. We cannot exist free. We must choose what brings the most consolation."

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