“In the beginning, the mountains had great wings.” So begins Italian publisher and writer Roberto Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch, a book that would become the first installment in an ambitious lifelong project meant to “unlock the mystical potential of literature,” in the words of Francesco Pacifico in the New Left Review. Calasso did this by reaching into the myths of our deep past and making them speak to us again, in what amounts to a kind of literary seance. These genre-bending works combined elements of fiction, history, biography, cultural analysis, and poetry into a rich collage of the fundamental symbols of human culture.
In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Calasso tapped the root of Hellenic myth. In Ka, he explored Vedic notions of sacrifice in India. In K. and La folie Baudelaire, he plumbed the idiosyncratic birth of modern literature in Kafka and Baudelaire. And in The Unnamable Present, Calasso pits French mystic Simone Weil against the positivism of Jeremy Bentham in order to explain, of all things, the roots of modern political terrorism.
All in all, there are 10 books in the “opera,” as Calasso called it, culminating in the recently translated The Book of All Books, his long-awaited confrontation with the Western monotheistic tradition. It is a masterpiece set within the masterpiece of the larger series itself.
What kind of man would have the gall to conceive of such an ambitious project? Born to upper-crust Tuscan intellectuals (his mother was a German translator and his father a law professor), Calasso grew into a brash young man comfortable in bohemian milieus. As a precocious teenager, he befriended Paduan intellectual Enzo Turolla and would eventually compose his English literature dissertation on Sir Thomas Browne’s theory of hieroglyphics while under the influence of hashish. His close ties with the publishing firm Adelphi Edizioni, with its reputation for the offbeat and politically problematic esoterica, further set him apart from the rest of the bland, left-of-center publishing world of post-war Italy. When Calasso died this summer, at the age of 80, he left behind a legacy of one who preserved the most vital elements of the past by remixing and reshuffling stories that had become stale with time.
Only someone with a supremely confident disposition would dare to reintroduce the Western reading public to their most foundational texts and myths as if they’d been misunderstood for the past 5,000 years. But, in a sense, this brashness doubles as, or corresponds with, to use a favorite phrase of Calasso, a unique sort of reverence. The Book of All Books begins with a Talmudic reading of creation: “Nine hundred and seventy-four generations before the world was created the Torah was written. How? With black fire on white fire.” As in most of Calasso’s work, esoteric symbolism immediately confronts the reader as a kind of riddle or challenge. You, sitting here reading this in your air-conditioned room: Is your inability to understand the deepest human wisdom of the past a failure of that world or yours? Why have the most valuable insights of humanity become opaque? The answer is revealed slowly, if at all, as Calasso’s engagement with the Torah unfolds, leading us through the experiences of the prophets and patriarchs in not necessarily chronological order (we read about Solomon before we read about Moses) toward something more mysterious than whatever we thought of them when we began reading.
Familiar names such as Samuel and David rise up and fall away, their stories punctuated by Calasso’s wit: “Fatal meetings tend to happen near wells,” or “Wisdom was the artificer, the plane, the tool,” or “Without separation, of one kind or another, there can be no Jews.” Calasso’s prose doesn’t move efficiently from one destination to another but rather circles around the subject in a kind of reverential dance. These circumambulations tend to crescendo into breathtaking passages, such as this from the chapter on the prophets Elijah and Elisha:
“More than any claims with regard to the uniqueness of Yahweh, or any denunciations of the ‘filthy idols’, what gives us a measure of the insuperable distance between Jerusalem and her many, noisy, neighbors is reading, the decisive power of reading a book. Which in this case was Deuteronomy, a summary of the entire law of Moses. And Deuteronomy, in Hebrew, is debarim, ‘words’. Right from the start, ‘to be Jewish is to be bookish,’ Simon Schama observed. The act of reading was not part of the theology. It was its prerequisite. The entire Bible is founded on this premise.”
One could say Calasso’s entire project is founded on this premise as well. The Book of All Books is a book about religion, but is it a religious book? It might be more accurate to say that it’s a book about the necessary prerequisites for religion, which is really the entire point of Calasso’s project. This prerequisite is a strengthening of the symbolic imagination, which is latent in the uniquely metaphysical nature of language itself. In his book on Baudelaire, Calasso quotes from one of the French poet’s letters: “The imagination is the most scientific of the faculties, because it is the only one to understand the universal analogy, or that which a mystical religion calls correspondence.” This sense of analogy, despite being a universal prerequisite for metaphysical sensitivity and spiritual commitment, manifests differently in various cultures. In the Levant of The Book of All Books, the mysterious absence of Yahweh is paradoxically synonymous with his presence. If that sounds mystical, it’s because it is. As Calasso writes in the chapter on Solomon, perhaps the strongest of the book:
“Solomon describes Wisdom as though sketching the portrait of an admirable woman: ‘Blessed and intelligent is her spirit, / one, many, subtle, / mutable, precise, pure, / bright, inviolable, benevolent, penetrating, / unshakable, charitable, friend to man, / still, safe, calm, / all powerful, watching over everything / and pervading all spirits / that are intelligent, pure, and very subtle.’ The capacity of Wisdom to shine through everything is extraordinary, because it is ‘an exhalation of [divine] power,’ and a ‘pure emanation of the glory of the Omnipotent.’”
If Calasso’s books on Greek and Indian myth made something strange and distant feel bone-deep, then The Book of All Books moves in the opposite direction, defamiliarizing us with the familiar with and returning it to us as a depthless mystery. In each case, though, it’s the same god-haunted language that Calasso resurrects, each phrase or insight acting as a kind of repudiation to our desymbolized world, where we’ve traded wisdom for data and depth for accumulation. For Calasso, life was always too large, too gratuitous, to find either form or resolution in our contemporary ideologies. What the gods, or God, symbolize for Calasso is this ultimately unmeasurable heft.
Scott Beauchamp is an editor for Landmarks, the journal of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy. His most recent book is Did You Kill Anyone?
