The Spy of the World

From Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core
Jump to: navigation, search
The Spy of the World
Author Giovanni Papini
Country Italy
Language Italian
Publisher Vallecchi
Publication date
1955

The Spy of the World (Italian: La spia del mondo ) is a collection of poetic and philosophical prose fragments written by Giovanni Papini.

The compendium presents, among other writings, the latest Schegge, the famous column of articles Papini authored, every two weeks, for the Corriere della Sera. Published in 1955, it was defined by the Commission of the Royal Swedish Academy as a work "worthy of the Nobel," and "characterized by the original personality of its author." However Papini was to be denied the Nobel prize for political reasons.[1]

Title description

The title of the book relates to King Lear, William Shakespeare's famous tragedy (Act V, Scene III): "The mad old king speaks to his daughter about God's spies," Papini explains, "which is more proof of his madness because God, having created the universe and being all-seeing, doesn't really need to send spies to tell him what the earth is like and what its inhabitants do."[2]

So we'll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,—

Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;—

And take upon's the mystery of things,

As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,

In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones

That ebb and flow by the moon.[3]

"These last words could also be understood in another sense," Papini elaborates, "namely that the spies of God are those who reveal to other men the secret of creation, of divine work, and it is in this sense that I present myself to readers as "spy of the world", that is, as someone who imagines that he has managed to surprise here and there some unaware aspect of things and some mysterious relationship between beings, thoughts and events."[4]

Notes

  1. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. Papini 1955
  3. Shakespeare 1971, 199–200.
  4. Papini 1955

References

  • Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  • Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.