Get the Hang of It

Montale’s introductory essay on Dante and what it says about our time, in which ‘an entirely new barbarousness is possible, a stifling and distortion of the very idea of civilization is possible.’

The storm is not as bad as I thought it might be, the storm is worse—there’s bird silence! Where are the birds? Are they thrashing around in the trees, being whipped by their masters? Or hiding, hanging on to something they know how to hang on to?

My father once declared war on me. I didn’t know he’d declared war on me then, but now I know. Our time together was lived in black-and-white in those days, when only the present tense was possible, in the days of being far beyond my father’s interest in current events.

Keep going is the mantra. Keep going by keeping going.

I accept my experience as fact. You can either scan the QR code to accept your experience, or order dim sun from another app. Maybe you can now buy the country of Italy or America and then put your name on it.

After a vote of No Confidence by his own Grand Council, Mussolini was removed from office in 1943 and hung upside down in a roadside gas station in northern Italy. Fascists still celebrate the site.