{"id":12551,"date":"2026-03-09T21:20:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T01:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-lost-16th-century-italian-art-of-living-with-fluency-serenity-and-openness-to-wonder-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2026-03-09T21:20:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T01:20:11","slug":"the-lost-16th-century-italian-art-of-living-with-fluency-serenity-and-openness-to-wonder-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-lost-16th-century-italian-art-of-living-with-fluency-serenity-and-openness-to-wonder-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lost 16th-century Italian Art of Living with Fluency, Serenity, and Openness to Wonder \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"Finding<\/p>\n

Language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great danger is that we come to mistake the shape for the substance, reducing concepts and experiences we cannot name or contain to the words tasked with holding the spill of the ineffable. (This is what makes The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows<\/em><\/a> so miraculous.) The more complex and tessellated the concept, the emotion, the experience, the more deficient the word for it and the more urgent the yearning to speak it with the tongue of the mind, to give it shape in sound and meaning in metaphor. <\/p>\n

Over and over, we have struggled to name that quality of being, that state of mind, that orientation of the spirit which \u201cthe good life\u201d<\/a> asks of us. Edith Wharton called its rudiment \u201can unassailable serenity.\u201d<\/a> Bertrand Russell called it \u201ca largeness of contemplation.\u201d<\/a> Iris Murdoch termed it, simply and perfectly, \u201cunselfing.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n

In one of the marvelous essays in her posthumous collection The Unforgivable<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), Italian writer Cristina Campo<\/strong> (April 29, 1923\u2013January 10, 1977) offers the 16th-century Italian term sprezzatura<\/em> for that ineffable quality of being upon which our deepest emotional, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic longings tremble. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Margaret C. Cook<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With an eye to the various definitions of the word, \u201call very beautiful and very imprecise\u201d \u2014 among them \u201cfrankness, fluency, the opposite of mannerism or affectation,\u201d \u201cservice to beauty,\u201d and \u201ca casual manner of speech or action\u2026 typical of a self-assured master\u201d \u2014 Campo considers the reductionism of a descriptive definition:<\/p>\n

\n

Sprezzatura<\/em> is in reality a whole moral attitude that, like the word itself, requires a context that is almost gone from the contemporary world, and, like the word itself, is at risk of disappearing. Or rather, since nothing that\u2019s real ever disappears, it is at risk of languishing in those oubliettes where, in savage and more honest times, they used to chain up princes who\u2019d provoked the ire of the people until their very names were forgotten.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Sprezzatura<\/em> is a moral rhythm, it is the music of an interior grace; it is the tempo<\/em>, I would like to say, in which the perfect freedom of any given destiny is made manifest, although it is always delineated by a secret ascesis. Two lines hide it, like a ring in a case: \u201cWith a light heart, with light hands, \/ to take life, to leave life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Illustration by Italian artist Mimmo Paladino<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We might find sprezzatura<\/em>, Campo observes, in the lives of the Trappist monks, in the \u201cferocious geometry behind the Dance of the Dragonflies<\/em>,\u201d in \u201cthe \u00e9tudes of Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Chopin, by which tenderness and turbulence, rubati and turbati, ecstasy itself and piercing premonition were mercilessly measured,\u201d and in fairy tales, of course<\/a>. Across its different manifestations, she considers its defining orientation of the spirit:<\/p>\n

\n

Above all else, sprezzatura<\/em> is in fact an alert and amiable imperviousness to the violence and baseness of others, an impassive acceptance \u2014 which to unperceiving eyes may look like callousness \u2014 of unchangeable situations that it tranquilly \u201cdecrees nonexistent\u201d (and in so doing ineffably modifies). But beware. Sprezzatura<\/em> is not kept alive or passed on for very long if it isn\u2019t founded, like religious vows, on an almost total detachment from earthly goods, a constant readiness to give them up if one happens to possess them, an evident indifference to death, a profound reverence for what is higher than oneself and for the impalpable, courageous, inexpressibly precious forms that are its emblems here below. Beauty (interior before becoming visible) above all, the generosity of spirit at its root, and a joyful way of being in the world. This means, among other things, the ability to fly in the face of criticism with smiling good grace and a dignified eloquence born of total forgetfulness of self\u2026 an immense, unceasing invitation to the interior liberation that is utter forgetfulness of self \u2014 of the ego magnetized by the sideways mirrors of psychology and the social \u2014 stripping off what hinders and deceives the spirit in order to acquire the light step and radiant rhythm that disburses the happiness of the saints\u2026 \u201cWith a light heart, with light hands\u2026\u201d A pure life is given its rhythm by this light and vehement music, composed entirely of forgetfulness and solicitude.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This \u201cineffable rhythm,\u201d she writes, is found in \u201cthe elegance of the living flame,\u201d in \u201cthe crash of interstellar silences,\u201d in encounters with \u201csupernatural beauty,\u201d \u201cwhere living and leaving are an ecstasy, one and the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

Couple with Campo on fairy tales as a lens on the paradox of knowing who you are and what you want<\/a>, then revisit Marie Howe\u2019s poem \u201cThe Maples,\u201d<\/a> which offers its own spare, splendid answer to the abiding question of how we should live our lives. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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