Translating D’Annunzio

Dinner Party Prophet

Sometimes when we first meet a person who is to change the course of our lives, we don’t even realize it. And yet, this sort of phenomenon — more or less the opposite of love at first sight — though it is perfectly ordinary, in accord with the bulk of human experience, deeply offends our common sense.¹ When it comes to matters of destiny, we have a strong, irrational, and all-too-telling preference for the clarity of fate. We would like such momentous meetings to be neatly written in the stars: for such things to be as obvious as Orion in the night sky. After all, how could we fail to see the very light that’s to lead us?

But long before things like common sense took hold there was a time when man looked up without recognizing the constellations or even the names of the stars. We looked up like a bunch of know-nothings, like children. To be blind one day to what we’ll never forget the next is human. Half of what we do with our eyes is close them. Thus in the wending course of our lives,…