Well…a premonitory wave of another literary undertaking is beginning to germinate, it seems. I want to hold this lightly, loose in the hands, as it were, because I’m still just touching into this, and don’t want it to begin to get a momentum of its own before I get out of the gates.
We are preparing for a trip to Europe. This will be the first time I’ve been out of the country in many years. My wife and I celebrate our 20th anniversary in May– a good reason for a trip.
I’ve been trying to carve out enough free time to learn Italian for several years, and I’ve embarked finally upon the language project.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita…
And I’ve been reading Ross King’s The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance.
The efflorescence that was the Florentine Renaissance, which vaulted Europe out of a thousand year period of arguable stagnation, seems to have been catalyzed by a very small number of people, several hundred more or less, over something like 80 years.
Of those known many were humanists– scholars, artists, architects, etc.,–receiving common inputs and in dialogue with one another either directly or through encountering one another’s work. As a student of contexts, I am wondering what particular contextual alchemy is required to create the conditions for the social cartography of genius.
Genius, I am told, comes from Nature. There is talent in it, but something else, some grace in it. Yet what happened in Florence defies expectation unless there is some other element at play here.
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