Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees

In my early teens, I discovered The Great Brain series of novels by J.D. Fitzgerald, and within a chapter, I was home.  I had never read a book that seemed to be written so exactly for me.  Encyclopedia Brown, while ostensibly on a similar topic, was clearly written by someone who didn't know what he was talking about, had never had the thoughts and feelings that he was trying to describe.  But the titular Great Brain knew, or at least his brother knew, because the stories were true.  This was really what it was like.  I wasn't imagining it.  Somebody understood.

As an adult, I've since found actual people who thought and felt like me.  Sometimes we get along, and sometimes less so.  One would think that such meetings are a comfort, and indeed they often are.  But equally often, they are a warning that whatever gifts I have, they are not in and of themselves enough.  There are so many variables at play in this existence, and so many of them are hostile.  It is vanishingly rare for things to turn out the way people would want them.  And for those of us who think and feel deeply, it is even more difficult because we want so much more.

Cosimo, the eponymous Baron, knew this.  And he couldn't have known this if the author--serendipitously also speaking in the voice of a younger brother--hadn't known it himself.  It is so easy to withdraw, to live in and for oneself, among the trees as it were.  On the surface, scouring yourself free of all the messy variables that come with people and society seems like a cure.  But it is not.  It makes it worse, drives you mad with frustration, until the only end left to you is to hop on a balloon and drift over the ocean.

But there is an alternative to a life in the trees, and it is put so precisely here that I will end by quoting it:

"...association renders men stronger and brings out each person's best gifts, and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest, decent, capable people there are for whom it is worth giving one's best (while living just for oneself very often the opposite happens, of seeing people's other side, the side which make one keep one's hand always on the hilt of one's sword)" (106).