Even as a young boy, Stendhal knew he was the writer he would become. His behavior might have been described as maniacal, megalomaniacal, with moments of true delirium, were it not for the work he’d accomplish “later.” He knew perfectly well that he had things to say. [ . . . ] His graphomania was a way of expanding the radius of a life he felt was constricted by time’s brevity—a way of leaving “traces of life” on whatever space was within reach (most moving of all, among the items now held in the Bucci Stendhal collection at Milan’s Sormani Library, is the powder—or tobacco—case with its interior covered in writing). And his cryptography is a way of making those traces evident by concealing them, of harnessing their secrecy, their complexity, to render them more interesting and expansive. And both of these things—graphomania and cryptography—belong to childhood and adolescence, respectively—to the discovery of writing and to its interiorization and reinvention. Children write on everything. And adolescents are always drawn to inventing “secret” scripts.
—Leonardo Sciascia, The Mystery of Majorana
Already at Combray I used to fix before my mind for its attention some image which had compelled me to look at it, a cloud, a triangle, a church spire, a flower, a stone, because I had the feeling that perhaps beneath these signs there lay something of a quite different kind which I must try to discover, some thought which they translated after the fashion of those hieroglyphic characters which at first one might suppose to represent only material objects. No doubt the process of decipherment was difficult, but only by accomplishing it could one arrive at whatever truth there was to read.
—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Time Regained, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
This book, like some ancient scripts, is an experiment. I’ve written it as if speaking to you, as if writing never existed, reciting the things that I’ve learned, studied, and researched over the course of half my life. I followed the same verbal impulse that I follow when giving a lecture to my students, patching together shreds of our discussions in class, of dinner conversations, chats with friends and colleagues and the people I love. I’ve simplified a good bit, but that’s less important. I wrote with my voice. As if, in drafting these pages, the letters, the keys, the keyboard were a hindrance, an extra motor task that slowed things down.
And this is how I wanted the book to feel, as if dictated aloud. I’ve purposefully given it an oral form, to get a sense of just how heavy the armor of writing can be.
The result of this experiment is that, almost without realizing it, I’ve tiptoed around the thing I meant to write about: I’ve sidelined the very subject of the book. My belief, in the end, is that I’ve done this in order to keep my ears tuned to something else, not simply to “writing” but to that which unites us, that which we hold in common. That which makes it possible to communicate—sometimes precisely, more often imprecisely—using written sounds. Perhaps it’s true, then, that when it’s not tied to our emotions, our heart, our inescapable interconnectedness, writing has no purpose at all.
What does serve a purpose, however, are acknowledgments, even though they inevitably fall short: when it comes to expressing gratitude, words can never quite get it right. And so I’ll start off with a few anti-acknowledgments. All the accidents, the slip-ups, the misbegotten coincidences, missed trains and delayed flights, the various sticks in the spokes. Whatever fun I had writing this book, I owe it to them.
As for my friends, I’ll say only their names, which will make for some splendid examples of writing, once printed out: durable, solid, constant, just like the support these individuals gave me. Elena Caretta, Mattia Crespi (the number of times they read these words, shared their comments, their thoughts!), Elena Dusi, Lara Bloncksteiner. And Alessia Dimitri, above all, who first dreamed up this voyage, and Camilla Cottafavi and Giovanna Salvia. My deepest gratitude.
My superhuman, indomitable INSCRIBE team: Barbara Montecchi, Miguel Valério, Roberta Ravanelli, Andrea Santamaria, Michele Corazza, Lorenzo Lastilla, Eleonora Grassucci, Livia Biggi, Riccardo Gobbo, Adriano Fragomeni, Davide Facchinelli, Aris Anagnostopoulos, Eleonora Selvi, and everyone on INSCRIBE’s Scientific Board—far too many to name, though I’ll mention Gerald Cadogan, John Bennet, Fabio Tamburini, Massimo Warglien, Alex de Voogt.
And then, in no particular order: Alberto Rigolio, Alessandro Schiesaro, Irene Bozzoni, Giuseppe Ciccarone, Patrizia Campolongo, Raffaele Luiselli, Francesca Romana Berno, Emanuele Miola, Fabrizio Margaroli, Eleonora Litta Modignani, Giulia Biffis, Carlo Moccia, Guido Baccinelli, Chiara Adorisio, Azzurra, Lucilla, Bruno, the Gigettes, Grayson, Lucia, and my third niece, Chiara, born just after the publication of this book in Italian. Your support over the years has been the most beautiful gift I’ve ever received.
I’m truly grateful to my Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies at the University of Bologna and to the Sapienza School for Advanced Studies in Rome, where the idea for this book first took shape. Fredrik Härén and his Ideas Island project, an oasis of pure tranquility. The Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in Rome, Father Alberto Toutin Cataldo, Father Eric, and Luana Tarsi, who couldn’t have been more helpful and patient during our endless process of scanning the Rongorongo inscriptions. And to the magical air of Chamois, in the Alps, where the last pages of this book took their first breaths.
The post-postscriptum I reserve for my parents. My father, who inspired me in so many ways, with his good humor and intelligence. And my mother, who’s been reading me from the moment I learned to write, lending her careful attention to every single word.
I dedicate this book to Andrea Zerbini, who’s no longer with us, but who lives on in the words he so often repeated and that echo to this day, “Knowledge is the only thing we live for.” From A to Z, this book is for him.