Finished Salvo’s novel just before dinner. The End. Published by Greywolf, Agent Bill Clegg. Long-awaited, ten years in the making.
I am vain enough to see myself in a particular passage on page 222. The Jesuit, Father Manfred, is putting the boy Ciccio through some argumentative and intellectual paces. Ciccio had gotten a C-minus on a paper on Aristotle and Fr Manfred is trying to get him to see why, to get him to see important things about thinking and the why of the education the Jesuits are wasting on poor Ciccio. Finally Manfred asks him, in a sort of desperation:
‘” Put another way, one might ask, Is it better to feel or to think?’
‘That’s easy!’ Ciccio said. ‘To feel.’”
In a later scene Ciccio wakes up on a train.
” He couldn’t see anyone else in the cabin with him. Briefly he thought of himself, of what he might be feeling. But he figured that could only be fear, which had derailed him in the past and would not derail him now. And although he knew it was better to feel than to think, he resolved to think instead. (276)
I think this distinction between thinking and feeling and which is better, or “better,” comes from a conversation I had with the author, Salvatore Scibona, about two years ago, maybe three. It is a question I always like to ask students at a certain point in the semester or in a conversation. I use it to reference the Myers-Briggs Temperament Indicator, not Aristotle or Aquinas.
I might be totally wrong here too. As I say, I will admit to vanity here & perhaps that typical reader’s sin of looking from some fragment of himself in a book written by someone he knows. “I am So interesting, surely some one of my qualities or features must have Shaped this book.” (Just remembered—-Javier Marías has a brilliant novel about just this phenomenon, The Dark Back of Time, where he talks about how many people thought they saw themselves somehow in his earlier novel set in Oxford, All Souls.)
Well, who knows.
