Even the most inconsequential among us lives in history, and we resign ourselves to dwelling in its benign obscurity. Occasionally we meet someone whose private history has intersected History in the grander sense, and the collision, we learn with relief or alarm, depending on our temperament, is often unhappy. On Tuesday, I spent an hour speaking with a professor emeritus of aerospace engineering who was born in Italy in 1922. That’s the year Mussolini came to power and four years before Robert Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket – two events that shaped the professor’s life.
He was born in Formia, a small city on the Golfo di Gaeta, 90 miles southeast of Rome. The professor still detests Il Duce, especially for the reckless alliance he formed with Hitler. While an engineering student at the University of Rome, he was conscripted into the Italian army and with 500 other officers, most of whom were callow and thoroughly uncommitted to fascism, were shipped to Yugoslavia where they were eventually taken prisoner by Mussolini’s putative allies, the Germans. They were put on a train bound for Germany and the professor jumped off somewhere in northern Italy and walked back to Formia. The fate of the other Italian officers remains a mystery. He eventually arrived, after five years in Argentina, in the United States, in 1952 – perfect timing for an aerospace engineer, with the boom years just beginning.
I asked the professor – a charming man who turns 85 in August, loves to talk, and resembles the elderly Borges – about his education as a boy, and he said, “Greek and Latin. The best engineers in Italy are not those who go to the technical schools but the ones who study the classics. We know more about the world.”
I asked if he read Dante in grade school, as I had heard Italian students do. He said, “The whole mumbo-jumbo. Inferno is best. We liked that. The rest…,” he said, making a dismissive gesture with his arm. He had heard the name Eugenio Montale but knew nothing of the poet’s work. The professor has spent a career devising algorithms to solve optimal-control problems in aircraft. He has accommodated himself to the computer, he said, and this reminded me of a poem in Montale’s Diario Postumo, in which a computer makes an unexpected appearance. It always brings to mind another engineer I interviewed years ago who researched artificial intelligence and was dedicated to creating narrative-generating software – stories from machines. Not surprisingly, he published several science-fiction novels, which read as though they were already being written by machines. Here is Jonathan Galassi’s translation of “Nel Duemila,” “In the Year 2000,” written by Montale in 1972:
“We were undecided
between exulting and fear
at the news the computer
will replace the poet’s pen.
In my case, not knowing
How to use it, I’ll depend
On notecards drawn from memory,
and shuffle them at random.
But what does it matter now
If the gift is dying out –
An age is ending with me.”
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2 comments:
Pat
" If that eventual machine were ever to be realized, it would be a curiously disembodied kind of consciousness, for it would be without the sensitivity, intuitions, and pathos of our human flesh and blood.And without those qualities we are less than wise, certainly less human".
William Barrett, "Death of the Soul" from descartes to the computer.
Interesting post. As far as my generation is concerned, Dante was read in high school, like Montale and a very boring guy called Manzoni. Who would understand Dante at a younger age?
My computer is human. You cannot imagine how proud he makes me feel when he asks "do you want to stay connected?" when I shut Internet Explorer down. It doesn't happen every time, though. Some days he's not very attentive to what I do.
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