Almost a hundred years ago Italo Svevo wrote a little novel entitled, "Zeno's Conscience." I read this book about four or five years ago because the opening chapters were reported to be a humorous accounting of Zeno's attempt to give up cigarettes. I got much more than I bargained for in the novel.
Zeno is neurotic for certain. He curbs his anxieties with nicotine; he is a hopeless romantic in his youth and a somewhat hopeless husband in his older age. One of the most interesting things about the novel is the way in which his psychiatrist insists Zeno is seriously ill (which he is in many ways), however, Zeno is never really as ill as those around him. His illness seems to be spotting everyone else's illness and taking a few stabs at them. Zeno never really denies he himself is ill. He knows it, which in many ways makes him more sane than anyone else in the book.
Curiously, Zeno ends his "confession" and the novel's ending appears below for your consideration. The law of healthful selection is lost and sickness begets sickness. Students of history will recognize the both the sentiment (eugenics) and the subsequent results of this kind of thinking in the 20th century.
But he goes further really by painting a grim alternative to healthful selection and he sketches is not in terms of physicality or beauty, but rather psychological wholeness. That got me thinking about wellness and culture -- and the way that sickness truly begets sickness.
Anyway, it's spoils nothing of the novel to post the ending here. And if you have time, check out the book. Here it is:
"Any effort to give us health is
vain. It can belong only to the animal who knows a sole progress, that of his
own organism. When the swallow realized that for her no other life was possible
except migration, she strengthened the muscle that moves her wings, and it then
became the most substantial part of her organism. The mole buried herself, and
her whole body adapted to her need. The horse grew and transformed his hoof. We
don't know the process of some animals, but it must have occurred and it will
never have undermined their health.
But bespectacled man, on the
contrary, invents devices outside his body, and if health and nobility existed
in the inventor, they are almost always lacking in the user. Devices are
bought, sold, and stolen, and man becomes increasingly shrewd and weaker. His
first devices seemed extensions of his arm and could not be effective without
strength; but, by now, the device no longer has any relation to the limb. And
it is the device that creates sickness, abandoning the Law that was always on
Earth, the creator. The law of the strongest vanished, and we lost healthful
selection. We would need much more than psychoanalysis. Under the law
established by the possessor of the greatest number of devices, sickness and
the sick flourish.
Perhaps, through an un-heard of
catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. When poison gases no
longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will
invent an incomparable device, compared to which the explosives currently in
existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but
perhaps a bit sicker than the rest, will steal this device and climb to the
center of the earth to set it on a spot where may have maximum effect. There
will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again
a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness."
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