Chapter 9 - Conversations with the Dead

Summary

As the exemplar for this collection, I have chosen a letter written by a disgraced public official. It exhibits little in the way of style, employs no great literary flourishes, and shows even less in the way of artistic invention or originality. Yet despite its shortcomings and the unreliability of its author, this epistle possesses what I shall call the quality of magical génoise.

For Proust, it was a petite-madeleine that prompted his famous episode of involuntary nostalgia—a taste from childhood that thrust him back unexpectedly into the ruins of memory. For me, it was Niccolò Machiavelli's Letter to Vettori of 1513, read quite by accident, in the fall of 2020.

Machiavelli wrote the letter in trying circumstances. He had been imprisoned and tortured by the new political regime in Florence. Upon his miraculous release, he retreated to his father's house in Sant’Andrea in Percussina. He found himself alone. For diversions, he read poetry, tried to fall in love, and played cards. But in the Letter, each evening he tells his friend, the diplomat Francesco Vettori:

I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the threshold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered with mud and mire, and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born; and there I am not ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom, I dismiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death: I become completely part of them […] I have noted down what I have learned from their conversation, and I composed a little work, De Principatibus, where I delve as deeply as I can into thoughts on this subject […]

Machiavelli spent his evenings in conversation with the dead.