DECEPTIVE BEAUTY

DECEPTIVE BEAUTY

Jan 19, 2025 | ENVIRONMENT

Deceptive and dangerous is the beauty of the intense pink-orange and red sunsets that close the short winter days.

If you often witness these visual ‘spectacles’ it may be that you live in a wretchedly polluted area like mine. 

You must think I’m obsessed if I even associate sunsets with my periodic returns on the subject. 

Actually, these sunsets conceal a massive presence of nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere.

ISPRA Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e Ricerca Ambientale  explains nitrogen dioxide (NO2):
a reddish-brown gas, poorly soluble in water, toxic, with a strong, pungent odour and strong irritating power. It is a pollutant with a predominantly secondary component, as it is the product of the oxidation of nitrogen monoxide (NO).

Nitrogen dioxide is a widespread pollutant that has negative effects on human health and, together with nitrogen monoxide, contributes to photochemical smog.

Photochemical smog i.e. the formation of secondary pollutants is conditioned by the presence of light radiation in the ultraviolet region.

We grow up learning that the sky is blue, did you as a child ever have the ‘why?’ period?

Why the sky is blue is explained to us by Rayleigh’s Scattering. 

To summarise the concept in a small format, a bit like espresso 🙂 the scattering of light reflecting off small particles.

I would also point you to an interesting publication reporting on a study of sunsets in paintings, and at this point I cannot fail to mention William Turner. 

Title of the article published by EGU European Geoscinces Union:
Further evidence of the important environmental information content in the relationships between red and green depicted in the paintings of the great masters.

Assumption: We examine sunsets painted by famous artists as information for the optical depth of particles after large volcanic eruptions. Images derived from precision colour protocols applied to the paintings were compared with online images and found to provide accurate information.

We can imagine what changed in the atmosphere after volcanic eruptions, but there are no volcanoes here, so what happens?

When nitrogen dioxide particles are present in the air, it is as if a kind of geometry is created that obstructs the sun’s rays.

In these cases the red light through an interplay of different frequencies and wavelengths somehow manages to prevail.

Deceptive beauty.

That is why we see sunsets of intense, bewitching colours and allow ourselves to be enchanted by what is invisible to the eyes …

FAME D’ARIA – HUNGER FOR AIR

FAME D’ARIA – HUNGER FOR AIR

May 20, 2023 | BOOKS

Fame d’aria – Hunger for air is the latest book by Daniele Mencarelli published by Mondadori.

Daniele Mencarelli has needed no introduction for a while now.

Fame d’aria – Hunger for air appealed to me because of the structure, the writing and the way in which in real time the reader gets the full load of the eighteen years of life with Jacopo.

Jacopo is not the main character; Jacopo is Peter’s son, Pete is a man.

I say just a man because that is what I thought as I got to know him one line after another.

Pete is not a superhero, he is not a champion, he is not even an example. Peter is simply a person, a human being, as are all those who try to behave in the right way against the waves of the storm that is life: an incessant and continuous lashing that hits inexorably.

Also for this reading I thank Monica, and then I also say thank you to Luciana for pointing me to the meeting with the writer organized by The Pleasure of Telling. 

In this way I was able to listen directly to Daniele Mencarelli’s words and find out how his need to tell this story came about.

About six years ago he met a Peter and began to put the pieces together, details that seem to have no importance until the accumulation becomes an element that turns into writing, thinking about how to translate a memory “saved with a name” as if it were a document that has the power to illuminate the path to which to give life.

The immersion inside a life that was not his own was brutal for Daniele Mencarelli; no frieze was allowed to hide the disfigurement that always had to prevail.

In this book the author shifted to the third person while always keeping the present tense because he likes to give the impression that the events happen as they are read because he feels they are less distant.

I must say that the goal was fully achieved because even me as a reader felt literally inside the story.

The novel has an antecedent: in 2000 while going for a beer, Peter meets Bianca. They recognize each other and it is love at first sight.

In 2023 Pietro is a 50-year-old man and his car breaks down in Molise, with him there isn’t Bianca, there is his son Jacopo who is 18 years old and unfortunately has very low-functioning autism.

The village where they stop to look for a mechanic: Sant’Anna del Sannio does not exist in reality although it resembles many places that each of us can identify.

Pete and Jacopo are headed to Puglia where Bianca is waiting for them to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary.

The unexpected lasts three days and revolves around three characters: Oliviero the mechanic, Agata the bar owner, and Gaia. Thanks to her, we enter the father’s inner world and discover everything that families like theirs lack.

Basic seed: the scene as a moment of unveiling the human exactly as I was telling you about the Peter who I discovered while reading.

Daniele Mencarelli was born as a poet, poetry is able to name things, it captures the depth with respect to the scene. Narrative, on the other hand, is architecture of scenes that then takes the form of plot and psychological arc of the characters.

In fact, poetry should not be “strict poetic language,” but should live within the elements of the novel form.

Literature is a gesture that is meant to bear witness.

These words of Daniele Mencarelli find a particular embodiment in the book Fame d’aria – Hunger for air , I think.

But what struck me most was to learn about the author’s personal “hunger for air.”

Over-inked pages that give a sense of claustrophobia.

From this “hunger for air” literally comes the need to open up vertical spaces in the horizontal narrative.

The need to perceive much presence of white, that is, need to break the sentence and go to the head as if it were a need for air.

Reasoning as a poet in certain moments of the human you arrive with a broken speech. In the highest places of the human one arrives only with lyric.

A personal hunger for air.

How about you? When do you feel your hunger for air?

MAYBE MAKING CASTLES IN THE AIR IS NOT WRONG

MAYBE MAKING CASTLES IN THE AIR IS NOT WRONG

May 16, 2020 | ECONOMY, ITALY, WORK, WORLD

We have had evidence of how our custom can easily collapse like a house of cards.
Have you ever thought about it in these terms?
In a whisper the daily habits went from being routine in some cases even the subject of complaints, to being a precious certainty that we would like to have again.
In this, I believe we can say that we are united on a global level, although everyone has their own story, everyone walks their own path, and everyone has their own habits.
Habits that for some had perhaps become heavy bricks like habituation, for others instead modular and elusive as sand, or, just like in the tale of the three houses, built with cards.
Cards that say who we are as documents or badges, cards that frame us, allow us access, lead us, regulate us, finance us: cards, tickets, maps, contracts, banknotes.
Cards that represent our actions, our life.
Cards that we accumulate, cards that we keep in balance.
Or balances that keep us standing.
Technically to build a castle too new or perfect cards slip: there is need of “lived” ones.
Cards that have played, cards that have been held in the hands. Hands that must be firm.
Hands that can never shake, because balance cannot be held in hand.
And never before have we had concrete and disturbing proof of this.
The question is: what exactly do we learn from this demonstration?
Who or what really has power over so many “houses” and how could we let them fall in the sudden way we witnessed?
We now have fewer cards available to rebuild, and we will have to adopt different “customs”, which will not be chosen.
Or maybe we should take the opportunity to learn to question, to ask ourselves questions, to consider all the hypotheses, always.
In the Operette Morali Giacomo Leopardi asks:
“… why is any custom, even if corrupt and bad, difficult to discern from nature?”
The answer seems to be Erasmus of Rotterdam:
“There is no practice, however infamous, however atrocious, that does not impose itself, if it has the custom on its side.”
Custom as well as a constant way of proceeding, is also a source of law. The unwritten source for excellence, which consists of two elements: one of a material type, that is, the reiteration of a certain behavior by a community; the other, of a subjective type although objectively verifiable, is instead the widespread belief that that behavior is, not only morally or socially, but legally mandatory.
So we should consider rebuilding on some unusual bases and starting first of all from the awareness of what is the true important essence of our life.

Archives

Pin It on Pinterest