On 3 May 2022 we read from Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia (London, Picador, 2012), in particular the pages about Tony Cicoria (“A Bolt from the Blue: Sudden Musicophilia,” pp. 3-8).

This was the first time we read non-fiction, but the stories of Sacks’ neurological patients are so incredible, that they do, in fact, sound like fictional accounts; not to say that Sacks is a great writer, and the mix of medical precision and stylistic elegance makes his pages as fascinating as a piece of literature can be.

Tony Cicoria is an American doctor specialising in orthopaedic medicine, who, after being struck by lightning in 1994, developed a sudden, insatiable love for music. You can read about him on Wikipedia, but don’t: apart from a few more pieces of information about his life and qualifications, you will just find Sacks’ story made into small pieces and reassembled: it’s a pity, because the effect is not the same, and yet you recognise the source and can see the difference. So, if you have never read about Tony Cicoria before, go for Sacks’ original text: its precision, line of development, and breath will captivate you.

On YouTube you can also find Cicoria’s compositions. Yes, because his sudden love for music took the form not only of an insatiable desire to listen to music  — piano music, in particular — but also to let the music he felt inside come out: in other words, he wanted to be a vessel for the “music from heaven” he felt inside.

There are so many interesting things in this story as it is told by Sacks: first the lightning struck and the feeling of well-being and pure ecstasy, of being a soul without a body, that Cicoria experienced. Then, when he was brought back to life through CPR, his becoming very spiritual and feeling a special mission: that he had to translate, or compose, this “music from heaven” that came to him.

What is inspiration? How do you feel inspired? Cicoria felt “ ‘an absolute torrent’ of notes, with no breaks, no rests, between them, and he would have to give it shape and form.”

On Monday 7 February 2022, we read “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1842, which we took from the book of The Complete Stories by Poe, with an introduction by John Seelye (London: David Campbell, 1992), pp. 604-609. This reading was part of a session devoted to “Gothic and historical plague narratives in the nineteenth century,” and constituted the “Gothic” part, whereas the historical one was represented by Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi [The Betrothed], from which we read an extract.

The situation from which Poe’s story starts is very similar to Boccaccio’s frame narrative for the Decameron, which we read last week: there is a plague, and to escape it, a group of young people retires away from where the pestilence rages most furiously. Whereas Boccaccio recounts an historical event – the “Black Death” of 1348 and its effects in the city of Florence – Poe does not give us a precise setting: “The ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country”. Which country? This is the very beginning. “No pestilence had even been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its avatar and its seal – the redness and the horror of blood.”

If he leaves us uncertain about the time and the place of the narrative, Poe, however, gives us plenty of hints to understand where Prospero’s initiative is taking.

“But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these he retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.”

[Listen to this extract, read by Philip Rouse]

There is something sinister in this story from the very beginning: Prospero’s fearlessness and his friends’ gaiety are too much in contrast to the fury with which the plague rages. Similarly, their seclusion in the castellated abbey is somewhat too deep:

“A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair from without or of frenzy from within.”

[Listen to this extract, read by Philip Rouse]

While they are leaving outside the plague, they are also imprisoning themselves. They think they are safe (“[…] security […] within. Without was the Read Death”), but in fact they do not give themselves any way out, as the reader discovers little by little, with a growing sense of unease – that sense of unease that Poe masters so well. Like Prospero, the reader is caught in the trap, but unlike him, he sees it: when will the Red Death come?

On Monday 17 January 2022 we read Virginia’s Woolf’s diary entries of 1 and 18 January 1915 as part of a session devoted to “The new year and the future”, which also included Giacomo Leopardi’s “Dialogo di un venditore d’almanacchi e di un passeggere” [Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-by] and Dante’s Canto X, 22-81, 94-114.

When and how does a new year begin? On the very first day of the calendar in 1915, Virginia Woolf wrote: “To start this diary rightly, it should begin on the last day of the old year.” Why? Because the day before she had received a letter, and the matter was still unresolved the next morning, when she received another one: “a letter from Mrs Hallett. She said that she had had to dismiss Lily at a moments notice, owing to her misbehaviour. We naturally supposed that a certain kind of misbehaviour was meant; a married gardener, I hazarded. Our speculations made us uncomfortable all day. Now this morning I hear from Lily herself.”

On 18 January, in the afternoon, Virginia and Leonard went out: “This afternoon we went over the houses in Mecklenburgh Sqre; which has led to a long discussion about our future, & a fresh computation of income. The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.”

These two ideas—that the year does not begin on its first day, but on the last day of the previous year; and that the future is dark—seemed interesting to start a new year of readings. In Woolf’s pen, both ideas are entangled in very trivial matters: a servant dismissed, a computation of income. Even if Leonard is there in both cases, next to Virginia and presumably in the same position and on the same level (“We naturally supposed…”, “we went over the houses…”), this—amusing, of course—mix of trivial matters and relevant points for reflection made us recall Paola Masino’s novel Nascita e morte della massaia [Birth and Death of the Housewife], which we read on 10 December 2021, in particular the extract where the protagonist writes:

“Thursday, March 9th. – War has been declared against us. […] If they start distributing food stamps, Zefirina will have such little leeway to cheat on the shopping expenses that it won’t even be worth keeping an eye on her anymore.” Do you know any diary written by a man—whether it is a real private diary written by a male author, or a fictional diary by a male character—that contains such computations? If anything comes to your mind, thanks for letting us know about them.