'No Impediment to Doing Whatever One Will'

Someone wrote that The Leopard (1958) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is the world’s greatest novel not written by a Russian, and I wouldn’t argue too heartily with that judgment. It’s the story of Don Fabrizio Corbèra, Prince of Salina, the last of his noble line. It’s 1860 and Garibaldi’s armies have invaded Sicily. The Risorgimento is underway and a way of life is passing, as is Don Fabrizio’s life:

 

“In the growing dark he tried to count how much time he had really lived. His brain could not cope with the simple calculation any more; three months, three weeks, a total of six months, six by eight, eighty-four . . . forty-eight thousand . . . √840,000. He summed up. ‘I’m seventy-three years old, and all in all I may have lived, really lived, a total of two . . . three at the most.’ And the pains, the boredom, how long had they been? Useless to try and make himself count those; the whole of the rest; seventy years.”

 

Lampedusa is the patron saint of late-bloomers. He began writing The Leopard in his late fifties, died in 1957 at age sixty, and his sole novel was posthumously published a year later. Today is my seventy-third birthday and I’m pleased not to share Don Fabrizio’s sense of doom and defeat, but grateful to Lampedusa for the implied peptalk. Unlike Don Fabizio, I have three sons, all of whom are interesting people and, though still young, well established in life. I have never felt defeated and refuse to live up to someone’s stereotyped notion of who I ought to be. Horace Walpole writes to George Montagu of their friend Madame du Deffand on September 7, 1769:

 

“Feeling in herself no difference between the spirits of twenty-three and seventy-three, she thinks there is no impediment to doing whatever one will but the want of eyesight. If she had that, I am persuaded no consideration would prevent her making me a visit at Strawberry Hill. She makes songs, sings them, remembers all that ever were made; and, having lived from the most agreeable to the most reasoning age, has all that was amiable in the last, all that is sensible in this, without the vanity of the former, or the pedant impertinence of the latter. I have heard her dispute with all sorts of people, on all sorts of subjects, and never knew her in the wrong. She humbles the learned, sets right their disciples, and finds conversation for every body.”

 

A reader recently expressed surprise that I still post daily after almost twenty years. I told him it was mere momentum. Walpole continues:

 

“Death or diseases bar every portal through which we mean to pass; and, though we may escape them and reach the last chamber, what a wild adventurer is he that centres his hopes at the end of such an avenue! I am contented with the beggars of the threshold, and never propose going on, but as the gates open of themselves.”