The Narcissistic Pursuit of Narcissism

Let’s say you’re given just a couple of days, a week at most to live. It happens all the time. People go to the doctor and get bad news, a lousy prognosis while the rest of us are deciding whether we are going to have fish or meat for dinner. But let’s also say that you can’t get rid of the longing for attention that has always dogged you. Do you think you still have time to get a book out of this and will it be a novel or one of those non-fiction accounts, in this case of your short lived battle with chronic illness? Maybe if it’s a memoir you'll deal with this very tendency to experience grandiose fantasies even as you're on the brink of non-existence. Perhaps you'll title the book The Narcissistic Pursuit of Narcissism; in spite of your years of self-involvement you'll be praised for a relentless search for attention that dogged you right to the grave. In the book you'll describe how you put off dying for several hours or even a half a day so that you could complete the last chapter which was a summary of all the things you were never appreciated for. You'll describe how your last breathes were given up to the hope of posthumous fame. Part of what will be driving you will be the fact that there’s a certain cachet to being an artist or writer who'd not discovered in his own life time. Even though he was an aristocrat, Guiseppe di Lampedusa had trouble getting the attention of the Italian literary establishment and The Leopard, was only published after his death. And he wasn't the only one. The photographer Vivian Maier only achieved renown after she’d died. You realize your death is going to be your big opportunity and you throw yourself into the endeavor, refusing to see any loved ones, whose ministrations might impinge on your writing time. You decide to be an objective observer and keep six degrees of separation from your own end. The only rub is that you'll never know if your sacrifice pays off.

Sicily Journal I: Palazzo Corsini

Photo: Hallie Cohen

Descending down the Via Garibaldi from the American Academy in Rome, the Museo della Repubblica Romana e della memoria garibaldina and the Mausoleo Ossorio Gianicolense in back of which is the tomb of Goffredo Mameli the poet and adjustant to Garibaldi who died at 21 and composed “Fratelli d’Italia,” you come to the Palazzo Corsini on the Via della Lungara. The palazzo houses the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica and faces the Accademia Nationale Dei Lincei, a government supported institute that fosters the relationship between science and art. Galileo studied in the Biblioteca of the Accademia, whose ideas infuse the Palazzo and whose Caravaggio, Poussin and Fra Angelico’s now compete with an exhibit on minerals which also includes some exquisite antique texts. “I pigmenti nell’arte come nascono I colori” is an exhibit at the Palazzo which demonstrates the interweaving of science and art. The ghost of Garibaldi hangs over the ancient streets, leading to the Palazzo which is a kind of backwater to European culture filled as it is with lesser known works by artists like Rubens and Caracci. There’s even a painting by the father of Artemesia Gentilesci. The Palazzo is the kind of place where Guiseppe di Lampedusa the Sicilian writer of The Leopard, who died in Rome in l957, and wrote so artistically about the Risorgimento might have found solace.