Jorge Luis Borges wrote in 1942 a fascinating a slightly disquieting short story – Borges’ prose is always fascinating and disquieting in its absolute perfection and though-provoking elegance- « Funes el memorioso » which might be translated as « Funes the memorious ».

The protagonist of the story, Ireneo Funes, is a young man who, after falling from his horse develops a total form of memory for every single details of all what surrounds him.

He can remember the single exact shape of every cloud he has seen in the sky, he remember distinctively the nuance of green of every leaf of every plant he has seen.

Funes, Borges tells us, is incapable of Platonic ideas, of generalities, of abstraction; his world is one of intolerably uncountable details. He finds it very difficult to sleep, since he recalls every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which surround him.

At the end of the tale Borges describes how he has spent the whole night talking to Funes in total darkness and when a new morning breaks the light reveals to the writer the face of the 19 years old Funes which looks to him “more ancient than Egypt, anterior to the prophecies and the pyramids”.

I had always thought that the story was an imaginary metaphorical creation of Borges, but recently I have read about the studies on the still rather mysterious mechanisms of the rare brains which cannot forget anything.

An American violinist seems to be one of these people who can keep precise memory of every second of their life.

A poisoned gift or a remarkable precious quality?

There is the amazing ability to never forget a concept, a meeting, a date; there is the possibility to evocate exactly all what happened in every day of one life.

But there is also a kind of obligation to live constantly the past as if it was a continues present; all is always there, with sorrows, ended loves, bitter disappointments , always clear, always precise…

Being a living archive can be rewarding, but it’s also a not appealable sentence.

Oblivion is like a shelter of protection for every human being, we must forget to face life in a better way and to react.

Sages have always tried to train their memory to develop it and make it more performing and in parallel alchemists have tried to find the secret of the potion of oblivion.

We all have our time machines.

Some take us back, they're called memories.

Some take us forward, they're called dreams

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten

When did Count Lyev Nikolayevich Tolstoy die?

It depends on the calendar we intend to use to fix the date , once again all the convention we create to determinate time are so relative, in spite of our effort to make them valid and accurate.

In our case it’s a matter of Julian and Gregorian calendars which were not applied simultaneously in all countries, so when Tolstoy died, in Russia it was the 7th of November, while in Western Europe it was the 20th of November.

We might imagine being ideally in Russia exactly 100 years ago, on the 7th of November 1910.

Some days earlier, in the night between the 27th and the 28th of October, a 82 years old, man famous all over the world , had suddenly left his abode, his books, his family, his wife, most of all his wife.

It was a flight, not a planned trip. He had not any precise idea of his destination, he thought a little confusedly to join obscure disciples and to run a secret life, far from public obligations of fame and social status.

He travelled with one of his daughters and his doctor, maybe they intended to go to Rostov on Don or maybe to take there another train only.

But the old man, travelling in the third class carriage, felt poorly, maybe disturbed by the smoke, maybe too weak and tired.

They are obliged to leave the train at the first stop and they find themselves in a lost place which was even difficult to find on a map, Astapovo.

Nothing happened usually in Astapovo, it was just a railways connection, and probably none chose voluntarily to get off from train in Astapovo railways station.

There was nothing to give shelter to travellers, no inns, no cafés, and no restaurants.

They could only knock the door of the railways station master, Ivan Ivanovich Ozolin, who was totally shocked when he found out who was at his door in the middle of the night.

Just to give you an idea, imagine a station master of a small and quiet sleepy village of a lost corner of Alaska who is suddenly waken up at night by Barak Obama, with only other two people with him, asking him if he can sleep there because he doesn’t feel too well.

Tolstoy was extremely famous all over the world and he was venerated in Russia.

The kind and pragmatic Ozolin immediately reacted and offered to the renowned old writer his house and arranged his living room transforming it in bedroom for Tolstoy.

But also 100 years ago fame had a loud voice and could spread out news.

There was no internet, no telephone either, but there was telegraph.

And telegraph was enough to inform the entire world and, as a consequence, to attract a huge quantity of journalists, photographers and reporters not only from Russia, but from different countries.

In few days the quiet and obsolete railways station of Astapovo became a kind of mediatic circus.

I find intriguing and thought-provoking to think over about these events, with the old writer agonizing slowly and the whirling of people just outside the simple little house of the station master trying to overwhelm each other to get exclusive news to transmit by telegraph to their newspapers and magazines.

Maybe human nature doesn’t change that much, simply adopts different paces due to different technological means.

Tolstoy dead of pneumonia 100 years ago.

Probably the greatest novelist we have had.

He was a very complicated character with a deep relationship of love/hatred with his wife.

Obviously I won’t bore you with any poor attempt to sum up his biography, but if you have a little of curiosity to know something about the man, behind the writer and the artist (where is the border between these territories of one’s spirit?) you might read The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy or the good and fascinating book by Jay Parini "The Last Station".

I’d like to close my rambling talk by quoting Parini.

“For Leo Tolstoy and his extended household, diaries were an early version of Facebook. Everyone had his or her own page, and most people were fanatical recorders of their own feelings.

The great man himself kept voluminous diaries, making entries almost to the day of his death.

His doctor, his secretary, his disciples, his children, and – most of all – his wife also kept journals.

Of these, the greatest diarist of them all was Sofia, the Countess Tolstoy.”

The limits of intellectual dandyism are included in its essence.

The Dandy needs audience to perform his role and to feel existent; so, as a paradox, in spite of his claimed intellectual freedom and independence from schemes and fashions (the real dandy don’t follow fashions, he creates it) the Dandy depends on people whom he expect to be admired by or to shock .

Dandyism, as style and philosophy, is originally British.

The first dandy of 1800, George Bryan ‘Beau’ Brummell captured, in the turn of his cuff and the knot of his cravat, the studied irony and languor that defined his age.

But the archetype of intellectual dandy remains probably Oscar Wilde, who, in spite of his sublime witticism and his self-irony and great intelligence, could not tolerate the idea to be neglected by public, even though public was composed by people he didn’t esteem and intellectually much inferior to him.

The frailness of the artistic and hedonistic dandyism is the need to see its own reflexion constantly.

But there are features of the dandy which might exist by themselves as a spirit of gay misanthropy, a sceptical, world-weary, sophisticated, bored or blasé demeanour, independence...

Every time I read Oscar Wilde I realize again how valid his words can remains through centuries and changes of society, as if the basic elements of human nature were immutable.

His deep and voluntary blasé self-irony is a precious shelter against the risks of taking oneself too seriously to get, as a consequence, overwhelmed by ridiculousness.

Nobody can say in absolute which is the real face of a town, it’s even harder to say which is the real face of a person, but this would take us to a quite different topic....

Probably we might consider that everything is composed of different faces, which - like the faces of a well cut diamond - reflect different perspectives of the same reality, becoming, as a consequence, relative at its turn.

We can choose to focus our attention on the faces which appeal us in a deeper way, being aware that in no cases we might catch and gasp the totality.

This is the face of Venezia which attracts me.

The false silence of Venzia, which, in spite of the absence of cars is not silent at all, this confuse melody made of steps on cobbled pavements, noise of motorboat, voices echoed by narrow alleys .

Its precious, since it’s so rare, emptiness.

The time which slows down, nearly ready to stop for a little while.

A man who is waiting patiently for an adventurous fish...

The approach of the inhabitants to their town, when, always more rarely, they can feel it as really and only their own.

A visitor must be discreet and respectful and walk nearly unnoticed.

Only at these conditions Venezia might show its real face, without any mask.

Like a mature woman who had an extraordinary beauty in her youth, but still allow us to guess it, less striking, but enriched and softened by time.

I’m fully aware that who dares to be doubtfully critical about the future of so called e-books deserves to be treated like a kind of troglodyte.

I remember as a child to feel snobbishly sarcastic about the firm refusal of my great-grandmother to use the remote control for TV.

Even though we had told her how easier and more comfortable it would have been for her to change programs from her armchair, just pushing a bottom of the little harmless dark box, she kept on getting up and walk to the television set to change the channel manually.

It’s my turn now, I’m afraid, it means I’m definitely out of date, mercilessly elderly....

I’m the troglodyte now.

All the signals show clearly that the damned gimmick will be more than successful.

Amazon has announced that had sold more e-books, than reassuring, old fashioned paper books during Christmas period.

If I were more suspicious and distrustful than I really am, I’d might think that maybe this declaration is somehow related to the promotion of the new model of Kindle, the e-book reader produced by Amazon...but I’m not so twisted.

Don’t forget I’m the troglodyte.

The future will see the readers, if they keep on existing, downloading endless titles on a sophisticated electronically device and browsing virtual pages on an aseptic screen.

A whole library inside a pocket box...

Wonderful, isn’t it?

No endless shelves of book to dust anymore, full respect for forests of Amazonia (the pun is casual), which won’t be sacrificed to produced useless paper ( maybe they will be sacrificed for more noble purposes, like intensive agriculture, mines, I let you decided), no risk to get our fingers cut by the sharp edges of a paper page...

I know, I know, but we, the troglodytes, are slow and stubborn and stuck to our habits.

A book for us is still an object to like, to touch, to endear.

Its content, the novel, is like the soul of the book, but the book to be complete must have a material body too.

A book must get old like a friend, whom we can keep on loving during the years, feeling tenderness for their wrinkles and physical decay.

A book must smell of paper, of glue, of leather, of dust...

Leave me alone, if there is not any other possibility; leave me alone in my prehistoric cave, where things are still things, with shape and substance, let me alone with my old real books where I can even write on, yes, handwrite, with a pen.

I have learnt to use many very handy technological devices, I have learnt how to enjoy digital photography, I’m writing this useless note on a computer keyboard...

But we have all our limits.

I want that my books remain books.

I guarantee that I have read it until the end.

It has been a titanic task, because it’s a wordy huge book, badly written and I have disliked it from the very beginning.

Nevertheless I have read it until the last so welcome page.

It was not because of a form of masochism; it was because of my rational sense of logic, which prevents me from judging anything I don’t know directly.

I have always felt disturbed when people or groups judge a work, it can be either a movie or a book, without having seen or read it personally.

I think we have a kind of moral obligation to have at least a slight idea about what we talk of, to have a minimum of credibility in our always relative judgement.

I take all my responsibilities for the infinite ocean of boredom this novel made me sink into, because I had tried to read until the end the absurdly famous “Da Vinci Code”, by the same sly, shrewd and ungifted author and already at that time I had the same annoyed and disturbed feeling due to an approximate literary style and a total lack of depth of characters.

Just to avoid any possible misunderstanding, my disdainful disliking for “Da Vinci Code” was not due to any offended religious belief, since I could not be more distant intellectually from those matters. I was only deeply disturbed by the bad quality of the novel, from a literary point of view, and from the absurdity of the plot and its superficiality.

Oscar Wilde, who knew very well what he was talking about, said:

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.”

I suppose that the mechanism of popular success must be based on a reassuring repetitiveness, which already makes deeply shiver the individualist who is in me.

Mr. Brown is right in thinking that once he created a winning scheme, all what he has to do is repeating it.

So the ingredients to put into the magic cauldron are an improbable apprentice detective with a great physical endurance (all professors are usually gifted with great physical endurance) a confused and twisted plot based on a mixture of real and fake elements related to some important human organization, better if with some mystery and a flavour of secret society and then, last but not least the bad guy, who must be a monster in the classical meaning of the word, that is an extraordinary and amazing being, either a very cruel albino or a scaring fully tattooed giant and, of course, the bad guy must not have any nuance, but be a total summary of evil and must have suffered for lack of paternal presence or conflict with father. So it explains simply but effectively -according to Mr. Brown- the genesis of the transformation of a common person into the archetype of evil.

Once you have done that, all the rest is secondary, you can write at random in a very approximate style, in which even I, who I'm not of English mother tongue and I’m quite ignorant, can find appalling flaws.

I was totally fed up with the bizarre vicissitudes and absurd adventures of the characters, always described superficially and in a quite uninteresting way, but I could not help noticing some flagrant mistaken, presented as pure truth. Since I didn't analyse the novel, but I simply read it quickly to arrive safely to the end, always hoping to find at least a decent passage (I’m an optimist), I wonder how many other mistakes and inaccuracies are present in the book.

I simply noticed that Mr Brown makes one of his main characters declare that he devoured the Odyssey by Homer, being quite fascinated by epic fights among valiant warriors in shining armours. Unfortunately the epic fights are essential subject of the Iliad, a poem describing the war of Troy ( before Brad Pitt’s age), while there is not anything like that in the Odyssey, which treats a quite different subject.

If Mr Brown is not a fine expert in Greek classical literature, he has some limits also in philosophy.

Quoting Pythagoras he claims for sure that the great philosopher was the author of the famous aphorism

“Know thyself”

While the only sure thing is that it was carved on the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and it has been attributes to at least six or seven ancient Greek philosophers (personally I feel it more suitable for Socrates).

I know that there is never an end for the worst and it’s hard to claim anything in absolute. But at this stage I do think “The Lost symbol” is the worst book I have ready until the end.

Someone said rightly that no book can be completely bad and there is always a use for it.

If “The Lost symbols” had been thinner, it would have been good to put under a too short legs of a coffee table, maybe, but it’s too thick and heavy.

So far I have not found any destination for it.

I had thought to throw it out from my window, but it would have been dangerous because of its weight and definitely polluting for the environment.

So this last picture is only metaphorical.