55 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life

      forget -> get

    2. Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to get.

      人生的整個景象, 什麼選擇帶來什麼結果, 這都難以取得(難以預知)。

  2. Dec 2023
    1. la luce del giorno ci giungeva soltanto attraverso il piccolo portello d’ingresso

      The scant daylight that filters in from the small door and breaks the darkness of the underground gas tank does not simply penetrate the cold, damp, and suffocating enclosure in the author’s memory. It also infiltrates the second, revised edition of SQ, published by Einaudi in 1958. In its first version, which appeared eleven years earlier with De Silva, no daylight makes its way into the dark hole where Levi and his commando pretended to be working: ‘Eravamo in sei in una cisterna interrata, al buio. Non era uno dei lavori peggiori, perché nessuno ci controllava’ (OC I, 81; emphasis added). On closer inspection, the shift from complete darkness to twilight between the two versions can enrich our understanding of this chapter and, more broadly, of Levi’s art of testimony.

      Glossing another of the several details that Levi revised in his second edition of SQ, Marco Belpoliti explains that such ‘new’ elements simply show how Levi’s memory works ‘per affioramenti progressivi dei ricordi’ (OC I, 1453). The belated mention of the suffused light at the beginning of the 1958 version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ may indeed constitute yet another example of Levi’s progressive recollection. Certainly, some light must have illuminated the tank for the prisoners to carry out their task. Yet, as Vittorio Montemaggi notes (2011, 53-73), while adding to the realism of the scene, this nuance is also charged with symbolic overtones. It fulfills, in other words, a literary function. Montemaggi argues that this image may intertextually invoke the concluding scene of Dante’s Inferno, when, through a small opening, Dante and Virgil leave Hell’s cave to find themselves on the shore that surrounds Mount Purgatory. From here they begin their upward journey on a beautiful sunny morning. Similarly, by climbing out of the opening of the tank, Levi and Pikolo experience the hopeful transition from darkness into light: they leave the cave to be greeted by a restorative sun and the beauty of the distant mountains. Thus, the soft light suffusing the subterranean prison heralds both the benign presence of the sun and the moment of hopeful reprieve the two protagonists are about to experience. Its appearance in the opening scenes of the chapter’s second edition, therefore, performs a symbolic function. (This is perhaps also the case with the modified qualifier that defines the task assigned to the commando. While in the first version this was deemed merely ‘not the worst job’, in the second it becomes, in a more positive/sarcastic vein, a ‘luxury job’.)

      The intertextual allusions to Dante’s Ulysses and Purgatorio that are central to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ are also introduced by another, more explicit, intertextual reference. At the end of the previous chapter, ‘Esame di chimica’, Levi compares Alex the Kapo with the devils of Dante’s Malebolge (OC I, 223), thus signalling his metaphorical reaching of the lowest part of Dante’s Hell, where fraud rules. In the following chapter, as we have seen, he climbs out, both physically and symbolically, from the concentration camp analogue of a Dantean bolgia. Before being once more submerged by the reality of the camp, in his dialogue with Pikolo, Levi catches a momentary glimpse of humanity’s greatness. Similarly, Dante’s encounter with Ulysses in Inferno 26 may be read as a momentary exception within the base world of Malebolge. (This appears to be Levi’s reading of the episode, as suggested by his footnotes to the school edition of SQ (OC I, 1417-18).) Levi even follows the order of Dante’s cantos, as the devils of Malebranche make their appearance in Inferno 21-23, while Ulysses occupies canto 26.)

      Likewise, the friendship between Levi and Pikolo constitutes a ‘flaw of form’ in the camp’s universe, where all human relationships are reified. At the heart of this exception is a moment of shared humanity, made possible by a successful act of communication through translation. The precondition of this success is, in Robert Gordon’s words, the two protagonists’ ‘reciprocal openness to the other’ (Gordon 2001, 230). For Gordon, moreover, the true hero of this chapter is Jean Pikolo, ‘an intuitive master of the art of listening’ (249), who obeys ‘the ethical imperative to listen’ (252).

      Levi further elaborates on this ethical imperative in two contiguous short stories from Lilít e altri racconti, written and published some years later, between 1975 and 1981. In ‘Lilít’ and ‘Un discepolo’, Levi reworks the same narrative situation and Dantean subtext of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, but inverts the characters’ roles and their symbolic movement outside the ‘infernal’ hole. The second story is especially relevant for appreciating the significance of Levi’s almost imperceptible reworking of the opening scene of the 1958 version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’.

      ‘Un discepolo’ reports the episode of the newly arrived Hungarian prisoner, Bandi. Since Bandi’s moral integrity prevents him from breaking the senseless and cruel rules of the Lager, Levi feels compelled to ‘proselytise’ him and teach him to put his life before his moral system. By means of the story’s narrative setting, Levi brings readers back to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’:

      In quel tempo pulivamo cisterne. Scesi nella mia cisterna, e con me era Bandi. Alla debole luce della lampadina, lessi la lettera miracolosa, traducendola frettolosamente in tedesco. Bandi mi ascoltava con attenzione: non poteva certo capire molto, perché il tedesco non era la mia lingua né la sua, e poi perché il messaggio era scarno e reticente. Ma capì quello che era essenziale che capisse: che quel pezzo di carta fra le mie mani, giuntomi così precariamente, e che avrei distrutto prima di sera, era tuttavia una falla, una lacuna dell’universo nero che ci stringeva, e che attraverso ad essa poteva passare la speranza (OC II, 258; emphasis added).

      Several cues suggest that ‘Un discepolo’ could be read as a companion piece to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Both stories recount the same time in Levi’s life in the camp: we are back in the dark and damp underground tank from which Levi had climbed out after Pikolo. This time, however, Levi descends back into the infernal pit to carry a message of hope from the outside world. (With both Pikolo and Bandi, Levi uses the term ‘messaggio’.) It is once again he who is desperately trying to translate a text to an attentive listener, and, once again, it is the listener’s attentiveness and empathy that makes the act of communication possible despite the limits of translation. Finally, the ‘rupture’ in the time continuum of the Lager is once again completed by the unspoken act of sharing food, as Bandi freely gives Levi a stolen radish, the first fruit of Levi’s lesson (the same gesture is repeated in ‘Lilít’). In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi shares with his reader that, on that occasion, he would even have renounced his daily soup to be able to remember with greater accuracy Dante’s text.

      Speranza is not a word Levi uses lightly. We do not find it in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. I would like to suggest, however, that a hint of the hope Levi experienced on that sunny morning in his conversation with Pikolo is symbolised, in the second edition of SQ, by the fleeting daylight that ruptures the darkness of the tank. In ‘Un discepolo’, we learn that very little or no natural light penetrated their underground prison, as they needed a lamp to read Levi’s letter: ‘alla debole luce della lampadina, lessi la lettera miracolosa’. This realistic disclosure about the work conditions in the tank takes the place of the natural light Levi had introduced in his revised edition of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Thus, in ‘Un discepolo’, we are once more returned to the same dark enclosure of the first version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. If, however, the added detail of the sunlight disappears once more in the companion scene of ‘Un discepolo’, in its place we find that unspoken word: ‘la speranza’.

      FG

  3. Jul 2023
    1. The deep, active listening doulas are trained for involves holding back our own stories, comments, and feelings.
      • Restraint is exercised by End of Life Doulas - it's like counseling
      • Asking open-ended questions is ok.
  4. Jun 2023
    1. Jean è attentissimo

      As Levi writes in the preface to the theatrical adaptation of SQ - produced in collaboration with Pietro Alberto Marché - all those imprisoned in the Lager hoped to find an attentive audience: ‘speravamo non di vivere e raccontare, ma di vivere per raccontare. È il sogno dei reduci di tutti i tempi, e del forte e del vile, del poeta e del semplice, di Ulisse e del Ruzante’ (OC I, 1195). In this chapter, therefore, Ulysses’s canto does not simply identify the monologue of Dante’s Ulysses, which Levi painfully pieces together from memory and translates for Pikolo; it also signifies the song of the hero who has survived his ordeal and is eager to tell his story to anyone who is willing to listen. Levi drew inspiration for his radio and theatre adaptations of SQ from an earlier, independent radio program on Canadian national radio. Levi praises this experiment for its ability to capture the lack of communication, aggravated by the confusion of languages, that had been a central device in the Lager’s machine of dehumanisation and annihilation. As Levi reports, the Canadian authors explained their decision not to translate the bits of dialogues in different languages to convey the author’s experience, ‘perché questo isolamento è la parte fondamentale della sua sofferenza, e la sofferenza, sua e di tutti i prigionieri, scaturiva dal proposito deliberato di espellerli dalla comunità umana, di cancellare la loro identità, di ridurli da uomini a cose’ (OC I, 1196). Tellingly, the moment of catharsis between Levi and Pikolo is made possible by the act of translation, the only instrument capable of redeeming the Babelic confusion of languages.

      A willingness to listen, however, is the key precondition for successful communication and a veritable ‘flaw of form’ in the universe of the Lager, especially when this attitude is displayed by someone (like Pikolo) who enjoys a superior position in the camp’s hierarchy. Levi’s gratuitous election to be Pikolo’s travelling companion in the journey to the kitchen, and Pikolo’s openness to listen, may be fittingly celebrated through a subversive reinterpretation of Ulysses’s last words, ‘come altrui piacque’. Could this be part of the unspoken realisation that is capable of reshaping, albeit only contingently, Levi’s own understanding of their condition in the Lager?

      In two contiguous short stories from Lilít e altri racconti, Levi further elaborates on the ethical imperative to listen that is at the heart of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. He also reworks the same narrative situation and Dantean subtext from ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, but inverts the characters’ roles and their symbolic movement outside the ‘infernal’ hole (see also the story ‘Capaneo’).

      In ‘Lilít’, a heavy downpour of rain makes it impossible for prisoners to work and compels them to find shelter and temporary rest. Levi slides into a large pipe. From the other side of the pipe, another inmate known as Tischler enters. Tischler spends this recreational time sharing with Levi the story of Lilít. According to some Kabbalistic interpretations of the Bible, Lilít was Adam’s first wife. For rebelling against both Adam and God, she was turned into a devil and eventually became God’s mistress. Their union continues today and is the cause of evil and suffering in the world. Tischler teases Levi for not knowing this story and jokes about Levi being an Epicurean like all other Westerner Jews. The use of the label ‘Epicurean’ to define the ‘miscredenti’, I suggest, gestures to the subtext of Dante’s Inferno 10, where the sin of heresy is named precisely as Epicurus’s sin. Those punished for this sin are condemned to burn in a sarcophagus. Each sarcophagus houses several souls who, like Levi and Tischler, must share the same narrow space, but, crucially, are uninterested in communicating with each other. (Indeed some of Tischler’s phrasing echoes Dante: e.g. verrà un potente… farà morire Lilít’, and cf. Inf. 1.101-02.) This Dantean reminiscence is not the only element that links ‘Lilít’ to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Both stories recount a successful act of communication and storytelling in the Lager. But there are two significant inversions: this time, the protagonists move inside a hollow space and Levi is the one who plays the part of the attentive listener. This shift, I believe, is signalled in the text by Tischler’s injunction: ‘perché oggi la mia parte è di raccontare e di credere: l’incredulo oggi sei tu’ (OC II, 252; emphasis added). Tischler’s words seem to echo Levi’s thoughts in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ that ‘Se Jean è intelligente capirà. Capirà: oggi mi sento da tanto’. That Tischler plays the part that had been Levi’s in his dialogue with Pikolo is further confirmed by the former’s gesture of sharing an apple with Levi, before telling his story, as a way to celebrate their common birthday. This act amounted to blasphemy in the Lager, where everyone used every means to survive, even stealing food from other inmates. In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi tells us that, like Tischler, he would be willing to give up his daily ration of food in exchange for being able to remember Dante’s text correctly and share it with Pikolo: ‘Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare “non ne avevo alcuna” col finale’. Like Pikolo, and unlike Dante’s Epicureans, Levi pays attention to Tischler’s story and, by retelling it, saves it from annihilation.

      In ‘Un discepolo’, Levi is back in the underground tank and, as with Pikolo, he is trying to translate to another Häftling, Bandi, the text of a letter from his family that had been smuggled into the camp by an Italian worker. The episode is almost identical to the one narrated in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Once again, moreover, Levi emphasises his listener’s attention: ‘Bandi mi ascoltava con attenzione: non poteva certo capire molto, perché il tedesco non era la mia lingua né la sua, e poi perché il messaggio era scarno e reticente. Ma capì quello che era essenziale’ (OC II, 258; emphasis added). Bandi also shares food with Levi. Hence, the act of sharing/giving up food becomes a physical marker of their desire to share their lives through human communication and let themselves be nurtured by it.

      For Levi, the real protagonists of these exceptional acts of communication in the Lager are not the messengers but the listeners. Those, in other words, who were able to resist the continuous and exhausting process of reification enforced by the camp and could muster enough human empathy and curiosity to listen con attenzione.

      FG

    2. e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle

      Dante’s text ‘riguarda’, ‘has to do with’, Levi and Pikolo. ‘Considerate la vostra semenza: | Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, | Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.’ What I would emphasise is that by remembering and translating and discussing Dante, Levi and Pikolo live out that terzina from Inferno 26, or rather, they live out a new version of the terzina. That action - ‘ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’ - is a particular living out of Ulysses’ words. For Levi and Pikolo here, discussing Dante becomes a way of seeking after ‘virtute e conoscenza’, and of going beyond the camp’s Pillars of Hercules; ‘è scagliare se stessi al di là di una barriera’, as Levi writes earlier in the chapter. Yet while Dante’s Ulysses casts aside bonds of friendship and affection - seeing the ‘piéta | del vecchio padre’, the ‘debito amore | lo qual dovea Penelope far lieta’ as obstacles to his pursuit of ‘virtute e conoscenza’ - Levi and Pikolo seek after knowledge through conversation, through attention to each other. In the chapter Pikolo listens, he pays attention, he suggests possible translations, he reassures Levi. Interpreting Inferno 26 - ‘ragionare di queste cose’ - is a joint endeavour (Gordon 2001, 68-70; Insana 2009, 107-10; Montemaggi 2020, 127-42), an endeavour in which Levi and Pikolo pursue virtue and knowledge, but do so in a mode quite different to Ulysses (Montemaggi 2020, 133-35; Montemaggi 2011, 66-67, 71-72).

      What seems to matter particularly in this passage is that Pikolo and Levi realise that Dante’s is a text about them. ‘[F]orse […] ha ricevuto il messaggio, ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due’ (emphasis added). The ‘messaggio’ arising from Levi and Pikolo’s joint interpretation of Dante is not only a fuller understanding of the ideas Dante is expressing, important as that is, nor is the message limited to assessing the truthfulness of Dante’s words, important as that is too. But - and perhaps underpinning both of these - the ‘messaggio’ also involves recognising that Dante’s words speak about and to Levi and Pikolo. The repeated ‘riguarda’ casts the terzina as not just concerning humanity as a general, abstract category, but as concerning specific, particular lives: Pikolo’s and Levi’s. In the movement from Pikolo (‘lo riguarda’) outward to all those in travail and then narrowing inward to those in the camps (‘noi’) and then inward again to Pikolo and Levi (‘noi due’), the ‘riguarda’ also cast the terzina as open to be encountered in an equally personal light by others.

      At least here, the value of the Commedia seems ultimately to lie not in the particular elaboration that Dante offers of various worldviews, but in how the text becomes part of a reader’s lived experience. The two are, however, connected, and one of the questions arising from this chapter is: How? Levi tells us that Dante’s words - in and through the context of Levi’s encounter with them in Auschwitz - revealed to him, ‘perhaps’, ‘forse’, ‘il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere oggi qui’. A question perhaps worth investigating further would be: How might moving towards fuller understanding of the Commedia and particular lived experiences of Dante’s text inform each other?

      HPR

    1. la luce del giorno ci giungeva soltanto attraverso il piccolo portello d’ingresso

      The scant daylight that filters in from the small door and breaks the darkness of the underground gas tank does not simply penetrate the cold, damp, and suffocating enclosure in the author’s memory. It also infiltrates the second, revised edition of SQ, published by Einaudi in 1958. In its first version, which appeared eleven years earlier with De Silva, no daylight makes its way into the dark hole where Levi and his commando pretended to be working: ‘Eravamo in sei in una cisterna interrata, al buio. Non era uno dei lavori peggiori, perché nessuno ci controllava’ (OC I, 81; emphasis added). On closer inspection, the shift from complete darkness to twilight between the two versions can enrich our understanding of this chapter and, more broadly, of Levi’s art of testimony. Glossing another of the several details that Levi revised in his second edition of SQ, Marco Belpoliti explains that such ‘new’ elements simply show how Levi’s memory works ‘per affioramenti progressivi dei ricordi’ (OC I, 1453). The belated mention of the suffused light at the beginning of the 1958 version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ may indeed constitute yet another example of Levi’s progressive recollection. Certainly, some light must have illuminated the tank for the prisoners to carry out their task. Yet, as Vittorio Montemaggi notes (2011, 53-73), while adding to the realism of the scene, this nuance is also charged with symbolic overtones. It fulfills, in other words, a literary function. Montemaggi argues that this image may intertextually invoke the concluding scene of Dante’s Inferno, when, through a small opening, Dante and Virgil leave Hell’s cave to find themselves on the shore that surrounds Mount Purgatory. From here they begin their upward journey on a beautiful sunny morning. Similarly, by climbing out of the opening of the tank, Levi and Pikolo experience the hopeful transition from darkness into light: they leave the cave to be greeted by a restorative sun and the beauty of the distant mountains. Thus, the soft light suffusing the subterranean prison heralds both the benign presence of the sun and the moment of hopeful reprieve the two protagonists are about to experience. Its appearance in the opening scenes of the chapter’s second edition, therefore, performs a symbolic function. (This is perhaps also the case with the modified qualifier that defines the task assigned to the commando. While in the first version, this was deemed merely ‘not the worst job’, in the second it becomes, in a more positive/sarcastic vein, a ‘luxury job’.) The intertextual allusions to Dante’s Ulysses and Purgatorio that are central to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ are also introduced by another, more explicit, intertextual reference. At the end of the previous chapter, ‘Esame di chimica’, Levi compares Alex the Kapo with the devils of Dante’s Malebolge (OC I, 223), thus signalling his metaphorical reaching of the lowest part of Dante’s Hell, where fraud rules. In the following chapter, as we have seen, he climbs out, both physically and symbolically, from the concentration camp analogue of a Dantean bolgia. Before being once more submerged by the reality of the camp, in his dialogue with Pikolo, Levi catches a momentary glimpse of humanity’s greatness. Similarly, Dante’s encounter with Ulysses in Inferno 26 may be read as a momentary exception within the base world of Malebolge. (This appears to be Levi’s reading of the episode, as suggested by his footnotes to the school edition of SQ (OC I, 1417-18).) Levi even follows the order of Dante’s cantos, as the devils of Malebranche make their appearance in Inferno 21-23, while Ulysses occupies canto 26.) Likewise, the friendship between Levi and Pikolo constitutes a ‘flaw of form’ in the camp’s universe, where all human relationships are reified. At the heart of this exception is a moment of shared humanity, made possible by a successful act of communication through translation. The precondition of this success is, in Robert Gordon’s words, the two protagonists’ ‘reciprocal openness to the other’ (Gordon 2001, 230). For Gordon, moreover, the true hero of this chapter is Jean Pikolo, ‘an intuitive master of the art of listening’ (249), who obeys ‘the ethical imperative to listen’ (252). Levi further elaborates on this ethical imperative in two contiguous short stories from Lilít e altri racconti, written and published some years later, between 1975 and 1981. In ‘Lilít’ and ‘Un discepolo’, Levi reworks the same narrative situation and Dantean subtext of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, but inverts the characters’ roles and their symbolic movement outside the ‘infernal’ hole. The second story is especially relevant for appreciating the symbolic significance of Levi’s almost imperceptible reworking of the opening scene of the 1958 version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. ‘Un discepolo’ reports the episode of the newly arrived Hungarian prisoner, Bandi. Since Bandi’s moral integrity prevents him from breaking the senseless and cruel rules of the Lager, Levi feels compelled to ‘proselytise’ him and teach him to put his life before his moral system. By means of the story’s narrative setting, Levi brings readers back to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’:

      In quel tempo pulivamo cisterne. Scesi nella mia cisterna, e con me era Bandi. Alla debole luce della lampadina, lessi la lettera miracolosa, traducendola frettolosamente in tedesco. Bandi mi ascoltava con attenzione: non poteva certo capire molto, perché il tedesco non era la mia lingua né la sua, e poi perché il messaggio era scarno e reticente. Ma capì quello che era essenziale che capisse: che quel pezzo di carta fra le mie mani, giuntomi così precariamente, e che avrei distrutto prima di sera, era tuttavia una falla, una lacuna dell’universo nero che ci stringeva, e che attraverso ad essa poteva passare la speranza (OC II, 258; emphasis added).

      Several cues suggest that ‘Un discepolo’ could be read as a companion piece to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Both stories recount the same time in Levi’s life in the camp: we are back in the dark and damp underground tank from which Levi had climbed out after Pikolo. This time, however, Levi descends back into the infernal pit to carry a message of hope from the outside world. (With both Pikolo and Bandi, Levi uses the term ‘messaggio’.) It is once again he who is desperately trying to translate a text to an attentive listener, and, once again, it is the listener’s attentiveness and empathy that makes the act of communication possible despite the limits of translation. Finally, the ‘rupture’ in the time continuum of the Lager is once again completed by the unspoken act of sharing food, as Bandi freely gives Levi a stolen radish, the first fruit of Levi’s lesson (the same gesture is repeated in ‘Lilít’). In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi shares with his reader that, on that occasion, he would even have renounced his daily soup to be able to remember with greater accuracy Dante’s text. Speranza is not a word Levi uses lightly. We do not find it in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. I would like to suggest, however, that a hint of the hope Levi experienced on that sunny morning in his conversation with Pikolo is symbolised, in the second edition of SQ, by the fleeting daylight that ruptures the darkness of the tank. In ‘Un discepolo’, we learn that very little or no natural light penetrated their underground prison, as they needed a lamp to read Levi’s letter: ‘alla debole luce della lampadina, lessi la lettera miracolosa’. This realistic disclosure about the work conditions in the tank takes the place of the natural light Levi had introduced in his revised edition of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Thus, in ‘Un discepolo’, we are once more returned to the same dark enclosure of the first version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. If, however, the added detail of the sunlight disappears once more in the companion scene of ‘Un discepolo’, in its place we find that unspoken word: ‘la speranza’.

      FG

    2. la luce del giorno ci giungeva soltanto attraverso il piccolo portello d’ingresso

      The scant daylight that filters in from the small door and breaks the darkness of the underground gas tank does not simply penetrate the cold, damp, and suffocating enclosure in the author’s memory. It also infiltrates the second, revised edition of SQ, published by Einaudi in 1958. In its first version, which appeared eleven years earlier with De Silva, no daylight makes its way into the dark hole where Levi and his commando pretended to be working: ‘Eravamo in sei in una cisterna interrata, al buio. Non era uno dei lavori peggiori, perché nessuno ci controllava’ (OC I, 81; emphasis added). On closer inspection, the shift from complete darkness to twilight between the two versions can enrich our understanding of this chapter and, more broadly, of Levi’s art of testimony. Glossing another of the several details that Levi revised in his second edition of SQ, Marco Belpoliti explains that such ‘new’ elements simply show how Levi’s memory works ‘per affioramenti progressivi dei ricordi’ (OC I, 1453). The belated mention of the suffused light at the beginning of the 1958 version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ may indeed constitute yet another example of Levi’s progressive recollection. Certainly, some light must have illuminated the tank for the prisoners to carry out their task. Yet, as Vittorio Montemaggi notes (2011, 53-73), while adding to the realism of the scene, this nuance is also charged with symbolic overtones. It fulfills, in other words, a literary function. Montemaggi argues that this image may intertextually invoke the concluding scene of Dante’s Inferno, when, through a small opening, Dante and Virgil leave Hell’s cave to find themselves on the shore that surrounds Mount Purgatory. From here they begin their upward journey on a beautiful sunny morning. Similarly, by climbing out of the opening of the tank, Levi and Pikolo experience the hopeful transition from darkness into light: they leave the cave to be greeted by a restorative sun and the beauty of the distant mountains. Thus, the soft light suffusing the subterranean prison heralds both the benign presence of the sun and the moment of hopeful reprieve the two protagonists are about to experience. Its appearance in the opening scenes of the chapter’s second edition, therefore, performs a symbolic function. (This is perhaps also the case with the modified qualifier that defines the task assigned to the commando. While in the first version, this was deemed merely ‘not the worst job’, in the second it becomes, in a more positive/sarcastic vein, a ‘luxury job’.) The intertextual allusions to Dante’s Ulysses and Purgatorio that are central to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ are also introduced by another, more explicit, intertextual reference. At the end of the previous chapter, ‘Esame di chimica’, Levi compares Alex the Kapo with the devils of Dante’s Malebolge (OC I, 223), thus signalling his metaphorical reaching of the lowest part of Dante’s Hell, where fraud rules. In the following chapter, as we have seen, he climbs out, both physically and symbolically, from the concentration camp analogue of a Dantean bolgia. Before being once more submerged by the reality of the camp, in his dialogue with Pikolo, Levi catches a momentary glimpse of humanity’s greatness. Similarly, Dante’s encounter with Ulysses in Inferno 26 may be read as a momentary exception within the base world of Malebolge. (This appears to be Levi’s reading of the episode, as suggested by his footnotes to the school edition of SQ (OC I, 1417-18).) Levi even follows the order of Dante’s cantos, as the devils of Malebranche make their appearance in Inferno 21-23, while Ulysses occupies canto 26.) Likewise, the friendship between Levi and Pikolo constitutes a ‘flaw of form’ in the camp’s universe, where all human relationships are reified. At the heart of this exception is a moment of shared humanity, made possible by a successful act of communication through translation. The precondition of this success is, in Robert Gordon’s words, the two protagonists’ ‘reciprocal openness to the other’ (Gordon 2001, 230). For Gordon, moreover, the true hero of this chapter is Jean Pikolo, ‘an intuitive master of the art of listening’ (249), who obeys ‘the ethical imperative to listen’ (252). Levi further elaborates on this ethical imperative in two contiguous short stories from Lilít e altri racconti, written and published some years later, between 1975 and 1981. In ‘Lilít’ and ‘Un discepolo’, Levi reworks the same narrative situation and Dantean subtext of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, but inverts the characters’ roles and their symbolic movement outside the ‘infernal’ hole. The second story is especially relevant for appreciating the symbolic significance of Levi’s almost imperceptible reworking of the opening scene of the 1958 version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. ‘Un discepolo’ reports the episode of the newly arrived Hungarian prisoner, Bandi. Since Bandi’s moral integrity prevents him from breaking the senseless and cruel rules of the Lager, Levi feels compelled to ‘proselytise’ him and teach him to put his life before his moral system. By means of the story’s narrative setting, Levi brings readers back to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’:

      In quel tempo pulivamo cisterne. Scesi nella mia cisterna, e con me era Bandi. Alla debole luce della lampadina, lessi la lettera miracolosa, traducendola frettolosamente in tedesco. Bandi mi ascoltava con attenzione: non poteva certo capire molto, perché il tedesco non era la mia lingua né la sua, e poi perché il messaggio era scarno e reticente. Ma capì quello che era essenziale che capisse: che quel pezzo di carta fra le mie mani, giuntomi così precariamente, e che avrei distrutto prima di sera, era tuttavia una falla, una lacuna dell’universo nero che ci stringeva, e che attraverso ad essa poteva passare la speranza (OC II, 258; emphasis added).

      Several cues suggest that ‘Un discepolo’ could be read as a companion piece to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Both stories recount the same time in Levi’s life in the camp: we are back in the dark and damp underground tank from which Levi had climbed out after Pikolo. This time, however, Levi descends back into the infernal pit to carry a message of hope from the outside world. (With both Pikolo and Bandi, Levi uses the term ‘messaggio’.) It is once again he who is desperately trying to translate a text to an attentive listener, and, once again, it is the listener’s attentiveness and empathy that makes the act of communication possible despite the limits of translation. Finally, the ‘rupture’ in the time continuum of the Lager is once again completed by the unspoken act of sharing food, as Bandi freely gives Levi a stolen radish, the first fruit of Levi’s lesson (the same gesture is repeated in ‘Lilít’). In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi shares with his reader that, on that occasion, he would even have renounced his daily soup to be able to remember with greater accuracy Dante’s text. Speranza is not a word Levi uses lightly. We do not find it in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. I would like to suggest, however, that a hint of the hope Levi experienced on that sunny morning in his conversation with Pikolo is symbolised, in the second edition of SQ, by the fleeting daylight that ruptures the darkness of the tank. In ‘Un discepolo’, we learn that very little or no natural light penetrated their underground prison, as they needed a lamp to read Levi’s letter: ‘alla debole luce della lampadina, lessi la lettera miracolosa’. This realistic disclosure about the work conditions in the tank takes the place of the natural light Levi had introduced in his revised edition of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Thus, in ‘Un discepolo’, we are once more returned to the same dark enclosure of the first version of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. If, however, the added detail of the sunlight disappears once more in the companion scene of ‘Un discepolo’, in its place we find that unspoken word: ‘la speranza’.

      FG

    3. Jean è attentissimo

      As Levi writes in the preface to the theatrical adaptation of SQ - produced in collaboration with Pietro Alberto Marché - all those imprisoned in the Lager hoped to find an attentive audience: ‘speravamo non di vivere e raccontare, ma di vivere per raccontare. È il sogno dei reduci di tutti i tempi, e del forte e del vile, del poeta e del semplice, di Ulisse e del Ruzante’ (OC I, 1195). In this chapter, therefore, Ulysses’s canto does not simply identify the monologue of Dante’s Ulysses, which Levi painfully pieces together from memory and translates for Pikolo; it also signifies the song of the hero who has survived his ordeal and is eager to tell his story to anyone who is willing to listen. Levi drew inspiration for his radio and theatre adaptations of SQ from an earlier, independent radio program on Canadian national radio. Levi praises this experiment for its ability to capture the lack of communication, aggravated by the confusion of languages, that had been a central device in the Lager’s machine of dehumanisation and annihilation. As Levi reports, the Canadian authors explained their decision not to translate the bits of dialogues in different languages to convey the author’s experience, ‘perché questo isolamento è la parte fondamentale della sua sofferenza, e la sofferenza, sua e di tutti i prigionieri, scaturiva dal proposito deliberato di espellerli dalla comunità umana, di cancellare la loro identità, di ridurli da uomini a cose’ (OC I, 1196). Tellingly, the moment of catharsis between Levi and Pikolo is made possible by the act of translation, the only instrument capable of redeeming the Babelic confusion of languages.

      A willingness to listen, however, is the key precondition for successful communication and a veritable ‘flaw of form’ in the universe of the Lager, especially when this attitude is displayed by someone (like Pikolo) who enjoys a superior position in the camp’s hierarchy. Levi’s gratuitous election to be Pikolo’s travelling companion in the journey to the kitchen, and Pikolo’s openness to listen, may be fittingly celebrated through a subversive reinterpretation of Ulysses’s last words, ‘come altrui piacque’. Could this be part of the unspoken realisation that is capable of reshaping, albeit only contingently, Levi’s own understanding of their condition in the Lager?

      In two contiguous short stories from Lilít e altri racconti, Levi further elaborates on the ethical imperative to listen that is at the heart of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. In these stories, I argue, Levi reworks the same narrative situation and Dantean subtext from ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, but inverts the characters’ roles and their symbolic movement outside the ‘infernal’ hole (see also the story ‘Capaneo’).

      In ‘Lilít’, a heavy downpour of rain makes it impossible for prisoners to work and compels them to find shelter and temporary rest. Levi slides into a large pipe. From the other side of the pipe, another inmate known as Tischler enters. Tischler spends this recreational time sharing with Levi the story of Lilít. According to some Kabbalistic interpretations of the Bible, Lilít was Adam’s first wife. For rebelling against both Adam and God, she was turned into a devil and eventually became God’s mistress. Their union continues today and is the cause of evil and suffering in the world. Tischler teases Levi for not knowing this story and jokes about Levi being an Epicurean like all other Westerner Jews. The use of the label ‘Epicurean’ to define the ‘miscredenti’, I suggest, gestures to the subtext of Dante’s Inferno 10, where the sin of heresy is named precisely as Epicurus’s sin. Those punished for this sin are condemned to burn in a sarcophagus. Each sarcophagus houses several souls who, like Levi and Tischler, must share the same narrow space, but, crucially, are uninterested in communicating with each other. (Indeed some of Tischler’s phrasing echoes Dante: e.g. verrà un potente… farà morire Lilít’, and cf. Inf. 1.101-02.) This Dantean reminiscence is not the only element that links ‘Lilít’ to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Both stories recount a successful act of communication and storytelling in the Lager. But there are two significant inversions: this time, the protagonists move inside a hollow space and Levi is the one who plays the part of the attentive listener. This shift, I believe, is signalled in the text by Tischler’s injunction: ‘perché oggi la mia parte è di raccontare e di credere: l’incredulo oggi sei tu’ (OC II, 252; emphasis added). Tischler’s words seem to echo Levi’s thoughts in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ that ‘Se Jean è intelligente capirà. Capirà: oggi mi sento da tanto’. That Tischler plays the part that had been Levi’s in his dialogue with Pikolo is further confirmed by the former’s gesture of sharing an apple with Levi, before telling his story, as a way to celebrate their common birthday. This act amounted to blasphemy in the Lager, where everyone used every means to survive, even stealing food from other inmates. In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi tells us that, like Tischler, he would be willing to give up his daily ration of food in exchange for being able to remember Dante’s text correctly and share it with Pikolo: ‘Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare “non ne avevo alcuna” col finale’. Like Pikolo, and unlike Dante’s Epicureans, Levi pays attention to Tischler’s story and, by retelling it, saves it from annihilation.

      In ‘Un discepolo’, Levi is back in the underground tank and, as with Pikolo, he is trying to translate to another Häftling, Bandi, the text of a letter from his family that had been smuggled into the camp by an Italian worker. The episode is almost identical to the one narrated in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Once again, moreover, Levi emphasises his listener’s attention: ‘Bandi mi ascoltava con attenzione: non poteva certo capire molto, perché il tedesco non era la mia lingua né la sua, e poi perché il messaggio era scarno e reticente. Ma capì quello che era essenziale’ (OC II, 258; emphasis added). Bandi too shares food with Levi. Hence, the act of sharing/giving up food becomes a physical marker of their desire to share their lives through human communication and let themselves be nurtured by it.

      For Levi, the real protagonists of these exceptional acts of communication in the Lager are not the messengers but the listeners. Those, in other words, who were able to resist the continuous and exhausting process of reification enforced by the camp and could muster enough human empathy and curiosity to listen con attenzione.

      FG

  5. Jan 2023
    1. For a while, I forgot how fun it is to talk to users People seem to intuitively help you if you build something useful for them. And they come up with better ideas than you do.

      Peter Hagen, 2022-08-24 https://twitter.com/peterhagen_/status/1562535573134254080

      One can dramatically increase their potential combinatorial creativity not only by having their own ideas run into each other, for example in a commonplace book or card index/zettelkasten, but by putting them out into the world and allowing them to very actively interact with other people and their ideas.

      Reach, engagement and other factors may also help in the acceleration, but keep in mind that you also need to have the time and bandwidth to listen and often build context with those replies to be able to extract the ultimate real value out of those interactions.

    1. 个人学习可能取决于他人行为的主张突出了将学习环境视为一个涉及多个互动参与者的系统的重要性
  6. Oct 2022
    1. A seminal study conducted in 1979 by Gordon Bower, John Black and Terrence Turner showed that cognitive scripts prompt the recall and recognition of things we already know

      Scripts in memory for text https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010028579900094 April 1979.

      Abstract mentions how our existing scripts help determine how we remember texts that describe common events. The order of narration, and filling in of details is influenced by our internal script upon recall. Vgl [[Luisteren gaat uit van wat je al weet 20030309070740]] the linguistic notion that listening starts from what you already know (here the cogscripts)

  7. Aug 2022
    1. This is particularly important in the Dzogchen mengakde (oral pith instruction) transmission lineage. Different levels of meaning are transmitted, mediated by the master’s recognition of the student’s spiritual maturity and by the student’s ability to ‘hear’ the meaning contained in the words. As my Buddhist teacher would endlessly explain to his western students, brought up to expect ‘new information’: the more and more you listen, the more and more you hear.
  8. Jul 2022
  9. Local file Local file
    1. it remains a valuable teaching technique, and vari-ations on dictation such as dictogloss and running dictation are verypopular with learners and teachers.

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  10. Jun 2022
    1. really listening to others might be an act of irrational generosity. People will eat up your attention; it could be hours or years before they ever turn the same attention back on you. Sometimes, joyfully, your listening will yield something new, deliver them somewhere. Sometimes, the person will respond with generosity of their own, and the reciprocity will be powerful. But often, nothing.
    2. Brains learn from other brains, and listening well is the simplest way to draw a thread, open a channel
    3. Rogers held that the basic challenge of listening is this: consciousnesses are isolated from one another, and there are thickets of cognitive noise between them. Cutting through the noise requires effort. Listening well ‘requires that we get inside the speaker, that we grasp, from his point of view, just what it is he is communicating to us.’ This empathic leap is a real effort. It is much easier to judge another’s point of view, analyse it, categorise it. But to put it on, like a mental costume, is very hard.
    4. [W]e are encouraged to listen to our hearts, listen to our inner voices, and listen to our guts, but rarely are we encouraged to listen carefully and with intent to other people.
    5. The flipside of not listening is not questioning
    6. Bad listening signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them
  11. Mar 2022
    1. for tens of thousands of years Aboriginal people and tourists Islander people have paid incredibly close attention to the world around them and still do today have developed knowledge 00:09:51 systems that are more complex than we could ever imagine or as intellectually capable as anybody else if not much more and that their traditions have a very detailed scientific component that we can learn from if we just shut up and 00:10:04 listen

      For tens of thousands of years Aboriginal people and Torres Islander people have paid incredibly close attention to the world around them and still do today; have developed knowledge systems that are more complex than we could ever imagine; are as intellectually capable as anybody else if not much more, and that their traditions have a very detailed scientific component that we can learn from if we just shut up and listen. —Dr. Duane Hamacher

      AMEN! What a fantastic quote.

    1. The aggregated findings indicate a medium effect of listening SI (d = 0.69). These effects were also found to vary as a function of several moderator variables. Based on the obtained findings, L2 teachers are recommended to incorporate listening SI into L2 curricula. Pedagogical suggestions and directions for future research are provided in our discussion.
  12. Jan 2022
    1. ending conversations is a classic “coordination problem” that humans are unable to solve because doing so requires information that they normally keep from each other. As a result, most conversations appear to end when no one wants them to.
  13. Nov 2021
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  15. Sep 2020
    1. Nonverbal people hear it all—confessions and complaints, hopes and heartaches.

      Those who speak less often have more time to analyze what another person is saying. They also may notice things and body language that others who are speaking do not.

    1. when your stakeholder won’t listen to you, it’s not because your ideas aren’t sound. It’s not because your research isn’t solid. It’s because, sometimes, they believe it’s in their best interest notto listen to you.

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  16. Feb 2020
    1. Over the two weeks, I realized that listening is a cornerstone of pedagogical justice.

      An approach to education influenced by the Italian Resistance Movement in WWI, the Reggio Emilia Approach, identifies listening as a pedagogy and Carlina Rinaldi articulates it well. Here are some quotes from collaborative work from [Reggio Children and Harvard's Project Zero] x

  17. Jan 2020
    1. I didn’t know where the class was headed

      Another Reggio philosophy is understanding that to practice a Pedagogy of Listening and teaching into the intentions of our students makes us vulnerable and that we have to become more comfortable living with doubt and uncertainty. We participate in a process of Negotiated Learning that is child originated and teacher framed. This is an early childhood approach, and my background (K-4). Possibly adolescents can frame their own learning? Here is more info on Negotiated Learning.

  18. Sep 2019
    1. Communication effectiveness is determined by the level of shared interpretation of the message reached through listener response and feedback. When done successfully, the loop is complete, and both sender and receiver feel connected

      Reciprocated links between people.

    1. Objectives, Outline and Introduction for chapter on listening in the textbook

    2. explain the difference between listening and hearing understand the value of listening identify the three attributes of active listeners recognize barriers to effective listening employ strategies to engage listeners provide constructive 
feedback as a listener

      Main learning objectives of Listening Effectively in Principles of Public Speaking

    3. What makes public speaking truly effective is when the audience hears and listens

      Hears, listens, and ENGAGES with the speaker.

  19. Feb 2019
    1. Silently Wife, than Foolish in Rhetorick.

      I assume that's a typographical f that's intended as an s (Wise as opposed to Wife, Wise to counter Foolish)?

      Parallels again to Pizan, who urged women to use both manners and silence with rhetorical precision, as well as to Ratcliffe and Glenn's Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts

    1. noise

      What is Locke's notion of "noise"? He seems to be using it with a negative connotation, where noise is meaningless and incomprehensible, a clamor of sound and incongruencies that prevent understanding.

      But noise does not necessarily have to be meaningless or incomprehensible--it just takes the right way of listening to make sense of it (Cf. Ratcliffe's Rhetorical Listening).

  20. Jan 2019
    1. Pedagogy has at its core timeliness, mindfulness, and improvisation. Pedagogy concerns itself with the instantaneous, momentary, vital exchange that takes place in order for learning to happen.

      The emphasis here on mindfulness as a core component of vital exchanges makes me think of the most recent newsletter from Middlebury College's digital detox initiative: "Mindfulness and Radical Listening in Digital Spaces."

  21. Dec 2018
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  25. Jan 2017
    1. Students need two skills to succeed as lawyers and as professionals: listening and communicating. We must listen with care, which requires patience, focus, eye contact and managing moments of ennui productively — perhaps by double-checking one’s notes instead of a friend’s latest Instagram. Multitasking and the mediation of screens kill empathy.
  26. Dec 2016
    1. Inner Listening is a subject that is very relevant to everyone here. It has practical application in every circumstance and with every person you might meet. In fact, if you become proficient in practicing the things that we will speak of, you will have an opportunity to be far more effective in all your engagements and will be able to perceive things that are extremely useful beyond the realm of normal perception.
  27. May 2016
    1. When students see adults actually listening to them with respect, that is when they begin to realize they have a voice and can make a difference in their world.

      I hope this is true. And I love the idea that adults are that important to students. Still I wonder how this fits with the connected-learning notion that youth want to be heard and recognized by their peers. I suppose it isn't an either/or: some youth seek peer approval, others want to be heard by adults. When you post on an open social network, you never know who will respond.

  28. Apr 2016
  29. Jan 2016
    1. The divine faculties of Conscious Being, which you could call Hearing, Seeing, Tasting, Smelling, et cetera, the direct comprehending of Reality, could be called the vital signs. And right now the one vital sign that is functioning is Hearing. And it is a result of Listening. And that will give you a clue, because if you want to see, then you must look! And how do you look? Well, you want to see. You don’t want to see something in particular, because you don’t know what there is to see. But you want to see. And the “wanting” is the “looking.” And the seeing is what comes, just as Listening brings forth Hearing.
    1. What is significant here, and what has been significant about the past nine years is that you have engaged in Listening. You have not engaged in as much dialoguing as would have been helpful, but by virtue of your willingness to allow me to address others, you have put yourself in the position of relating to “the Real world,” to Reality. You are now able to consider looking at the fact that Reality is where you Are, and that you are different from the perceptions you have held so dear about yourself called the ego, the sidekick, “bumbling Paul,”—a personal, private sense of self that has very little to do with Reality. You are able to embrace that concept, which is actually the Fact, without significant fear—reluctance maybe, resistance, yes, but with little fear, and now with some active curiosity.

      A personal, private sense of self has very little to do with Reality.

    2. Therefore, the more consistently you dialogue with me, the more consistently you are letting in the possibility of an experience of Reality different from what you have decided reality is going to be for you. And that is the beginning of Sanity, of waking up! Your practice of Listening is your practice of coming out from seclusion in your own private, tiny sense of self and world.

      Your practice of Listening is your practice of coming out from seclusion in your own private, tiny sense of self and world.

    1. Would you not be in your right Mind? Would you not choose to move beyond even the happy dream? The happy dream is a stepping-stone, not a place to settle into. The happy dream is insubstantial—dreamlike because it still isn’t Reality. But, it does promote the dissolving of denser illusion which seems so real. And, as I said, the stepping-stone begins to crumble, and you must make the final leap across the little gap that is no gap at all. The issue here is not money or schedule or any other obligation to the human condition. The issue is Listening permanently—committing to me rather than your fantasy sidekick, your imaginary self. In this act, you must necessarily come into the full conscious awareness as my brother—the real You that You Are.

      Commitment to listening consciously to my Self, my Being.. not the ego self....

      The final step across the gap.... to move beyond the 'happy dream'....

    2. Raj: Paul, we have been addressing what needs to be addressed. The events of daily life will continue, but will not become the focal points to be addressed. The key here is Listening—and this does not mean letting down and resorting to instinct, memory, or personality patterns where you unthinkingly respond to the so-called stimulus of life. Listening is unthinking, but not un-Self-conscious, and actions arise out of Knowing—not inaction or reaction. Being is not responsive!

      Listening consciously from which actions arise out of Knowing.

  30. Jul 2015
    1. How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

      Or Restorative Justice these days, I suppose. Yeah, there's something going on here. I need to just listen more.

  31. Oct 2013
    1. For men of quick intellect and glowing temperament find it easier to become eloquent by reading and listening to eloquent speakers than by following rules for eloquence.

      Similar to what Quintilian said.