Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are going
to talk about a very specific, very human kind
of madness. You know that feeling when you decide
to change your life? That rush of adrenaline
when you say, okay, starting Monday, no more
junk food? Whoa! Or starting tomorrow, I'm going
to write that novel. The moment of resolve, it's
intoxicating, isn't it? Exactly. It feels better
than actually doing the thing. And today, we're
looking at a man who got so addicted to that
feeling. the thrill of the last one, that he
built his entire life and literature around it.
It's incredible. We're talking about a guy who
spent decades planning to quit smoking, writing
dates on the walls, celebrating the last cigarette
over and over again, just so he could feel the
pleasure of restarting. And the irony, of course,
is that this wasn't just a personal quirk. It
was the engine that drove one of the most important
and I think accidental literary careers of the
20th century. We are diving into the life of
a man born Aaron Hector Schmitz, who the world
eventually came to know as Italos Fevo. A name
most people probably haven't heard. Exactly.
And if you're listening to this and thinking,
I've never heard of him, that is actually part
of the story. For most of his life, nobody else
had either. We're looking at a failed writer
who spent the prime of his life selling, of all
things, underwater paint for warships. Which
is not the typical biography of a literary genius.
Not at all, yeah. Usually we hear about the starving
artist in the Garrett or the professor or the
journalist. We rarely hear about the industrial
paint salesman. Not at all. But the sources we
have today. biographies, literary analysis, and
specifically his masterpiece, Zeno's Conscience,
tell a story of how this paint salesman ended
up really inventing the modern psychological
novel. He absolutely did. And the craziest part,
he likely would have died completely unknown
if he hadn't hired a random English tutor in
Trieste who just happened to be a young, broke
James Joyce. It's one of those history -altering
coincidences that you just can't make up. It
sounds like fiction. It really does. So our mission
today is to unpack this. We want to understand
how a man who considered himself a failure a
totally inept figure as he would say managed
to pioneer the use of Freudian theory in fiction
before it was even really accepted in Italy.
Right. We're going to look at the psychology
of the unreliable narrator and ultimately we're
going to see what this man of smoke can teach
us about our own. you know, our own addictions
to self -improvement. So let's get into the context.
Yeah. Because you can't understand Sfavo without
understanding where he was standing. Trieste.
Right. So today, if you look at a map, Trieste
is in Italy. It's right there in the northeast
corner, kind of tucked away. But in 1861, when
our subject was born, the map looked very, very
different. Trieste was the jewel of the Austrian
Empire. So we're talking about the Habsburgs.
Exactly. Later Austria -Hungary, it was the empire's
main outlet to the sea, its biggest, most important
port. So imagine a city that isn't quite Italian,
isn't quite German, isn't quite Slavic. It's
everything at once. It's this massive, bustling
commercial hub. You have coffee traders, insurance
magnates, naval officers from all over the world.
It's a melting pot in the truest sense of the
word. It sounds like a place where identity would
be. Slippery. Slippery is the perfect word. It
was a liminal space. You had the rigid bureaucracy
of Vienna, you know, all in German, trying to
manage a population that was culturally Mediterranean
Italian speaking. And Aaron Hector Schmitz, our
future Idola Svevo, is born right into the middle
of this identity crisis. He is the crisis personified.
I mean, let's look at his family. He's born into
a Jewish family, right? A secular Jewish family,
yes. And his father is a... German -speaking
businessman. His mother is Italian. So right
there at the dinner table, you have this clash
of cultures. And strictly speaking, it wasn't
just a clash. It was a hierarchy. In the Austrian
Empire, German was the language of power. It
was the language of commerce, of the law, of
getting ahead. And Italian. Italian was the language
of the streets in Trieste, but it wasn't even
standard Italian, the proper literary Italian.
I read that he didn't even speak proper Italian
growing up. That seems wild for someone who becomes
a famous Italian writer. That's the crucial point
that many people miss. His first language, the
language of his heart and his home, was the Treestein
dialect. It's a Venetian dialect, very specific
to that region. It has its own rhythm, its own
vocabulary, standard literary Italian, the language
of Dante and Patriarch, the language of the academy
was actually his second language. He had to learn
it almost like a foreign tongue. And then on
top of that, because his father was of German
heritage and wanted his sons to be successful
in the Austrian Empire. He sends them away. He
sent Aaron and his brothers away to boarding
school. In Germany. So he's completely immersed.
Completely. Near Würzburg. So from the age of
12, he is immersed in German. He's reading Goethe,
Schiller, Schopenhauer in the original German.
He's reading Shakespeare in German translation.
He's reading the Russian classics. So by the
time he comes back to Prieste, he's this total
cultural hybrid. A lot of layers. He's Jewish,
but secular. He's Italian by birth, but German
by education. And he's living in an Austrian
port city. It sounds like he didn't have a solid
ground to stand on. Like if someone asked him,
what are you? Yeah. The answer would take five
minutes to explain. Which is exactly why he later
shows the pseudonym Italo Svevo. It wasn't just
a catchy name. It was a map of his psyche. Break
that down. Italo obviously means Italian. Svevo
refers to Swabian, which is a historical region
of Germany. So literally he called himself. Adelice,
the Swabian. That feels almost contradictory,
like calling yourself the French Englishman or
something. It was a contradiction and it was
a statement. But in the late 19th century, that
was a dangerous thing to be. Nationalism was
on the rise everywhere. People wanted you to
pick a side. Are you Italian? Are you Austrian?
And he's saying. And here comes this guy saying,
I am the hyphen. I am both. He was signaling
that he was a bridge between these cultures.
But for a long time, being a bridge just meant
everyone walked all over you. So he comes back
to Trieste in 1880. He's young. He's incredibly
well read. He has this head full of European
literature. He wants to be a writer. He probably
envisions a life of, you know, leisure, writing
plays, living off his father's money. That was
absolutely the plan. His father had a successful
glassware business. Aaron probably thought he
was set for life. He could be a gentleman scholar,
dabble in the arts, maybe publish a few poems.
But then... The reality of 19th century capitalism
hit. Hard. The crash. His father's business collapsed.
It went bankrupt. And purely from a practical
standpoint, the man of leisure dream just evaporates
instantly. All gone. The young intellectual who
just wants to read Hamlet and write stories now
has to go out and get a job to support the family.
And he doesn't get a job in a library or a university
where he could maybe use his brain in a creative
way? Oh, no, nothing like that. He gets a job
at the Union Bank of Vienna. As a correspondence
clerk. That is a soul -crushing pivot from literature
to ledgers. And he stayed there for 20 years.
20 years. I want to pause on that because we
often hear stories of writers who struggle for
a year or two. Maybe they wait tables or drive
a cab. But 20 years of sitting behind a counter,
processing transactions, writing business letters
in French and German, that has to do something
to a person's mind. It did. It created this deep
sense of alienation. He referred to those hours
at the bank as time subtracted from life. He
felt like a cog in a machine. But, and this is
the key insight for us, that drudgery is what
gave his writing its unique flavor. How so? He
wasn't writing about heroic nights or sweeping
romances. He began to write about the grayness
of modern life. The bureaucracy. The feeling
of being trapped in a system you can't control.
The small, private humiliations of an office.
job. It reminds me of Franz Kafka working at
the Insurance Institute. The comparison is very,
very apt. They were both subjects of the Austro
-Hungarian Empire, both Jewish, both trapped
in bureaucratic jobs they hated, and both writing
about the absurdity of systems. They were contemporaries
wrestling with the same modern condition. So
he was writing in secret during this time, hiding
it from his colleagues. He was. He was leading
a complete double life. By day, the respectable,
punctual bank clerk, Aaron Schmitz. By night,
Or perhaps hiding manuscripts under the ledger
when the boss wasn't looking. He was writing
novels. And he was politically active, too. Yes.
And this is another fascinating contradiction.
He was contributing articles to a socialist newspaper
called L 'Indépendant, a banker writing for a
socialist paper. It just shows how fragmented
his life was. OK, so let's talk about those early
attempts, because often when we tell these stories,
we skip to the success. But the failure here
is really, really important. He publishes his
first novel. Una vita, which means a life in
1892. And he paid to have it published. That's
an important detail. No publisher was breaking
down his door. He believed in it enough to finance
it himself, which is a huge financial risk for
a bank clerk. Ouch. And the reception? What did
the critics say? Nothing. Absolute crushing silence.
It was completely ignored. It didn't even get
bad reviews. It just got no reviews. It was like
shouting into a void. It just vanished. That
might be worse than a bad review. It's much worse.
At least a bad review means someone read it,
someone engaged with it. Silence is just indifference.
Okay. But he persists. He doesn't give up yet.
He writes another one. Sinili Ta, published in
1898. senility which is usually translated as
senility or more accurately as a man grows older
he poured his heart into this one it's a much
more focused psychologically dense book he thought
this is it this is the one that proves i'm a
writer it's a melancholy story right about a
man who kind of fails in Love and Life. Very
much so. It's about self -deception. About a
man who creates these romantic fantasies and
then is crushed when reality doesn't match up.
It's a very suave book. What was the verdict
on this one? It was a disaster. But this time
it was worse than silence. The critics who did
bother to read it hated it. And do you know what
they attacked? Let me guess. The plot. The depressing
characters. They attacked his language. They
mocked his Italian. Yes. Remember, Italian was
his second language, and his professional life
was in German. The critics said his style was
commercial, uncultured, barbaric. They said it
was full of business jargon and German -influenced
sentence structures. So they didn't see it as
a new style, they saw it as... Incorrect. They
saw it as incompetence. It wasn't the flowery,
poetic Italian that was popular at the time.
The style of a writer like Donizio. Svevo's style
was dry, analytical, almost clinical. And they
just savaged him for it. That criticism must
have stung. It's not just your story is bad.
It's you don't even know how to speak our language.
It attacks his very identity. It destroyed him.
It confirmed his deepest insecurity that he was
an outsider, an imposter. After Senilatov flopped
so spectacularly, Svevo made a dramatic decision.
He gives up. He formally renounced literature.
He wrote in his diary that writing was a ridiculous
and harmful thing. He decided that he was not
a writer, that he had been deluding himself for
years. He quit. He quit. He entered a period
of literary silence that lasted for over two
decades. He buried Italo Svevo and became just
Aaron Schmitz, the businessman. And his life
took a massive turnaround this time, right? He
got married. Yes. In 1896, right before Senelita
came out, he married his cousin, Livia Veneziani.
His cousin. It was the 19th century. These things
happened, especially within tight -knit bourgeois
communities. But Livia wasn't just his cousin.
She was his ticket out of the bank. Because her
family was wealthy. Very wealthy. The Veneziani
family were industrialists. They were big players
in Trieste. There is an interesting detail in
the notes about his religion here. Sveva was
Jewish. Livia was Catholic. Right. And Livia,
a devout Catholic, perhaps concerned about social
standing or maybe due to a difficult pregnancy
where she wanted spiritual protection, convinced
him to convert. So purely for pragmatic reasons,
he converts to Catholicism. But he didn't actually
believe it. Not for a second. He remained a staunch
atheist privately. But this is another layer
of the mask, isn't it? He's acting the part of
the good Catholic husband. He's acting the part
of the banker. He's acting the part of the non
-writer. He is a man composed entirely of performances.
He's wearing a costume of normal bourgeois gentleman.
Perfectly put. And then he joins the in -law's
business. And this isn't just any business. This
is the detail that I find so fascinatingly specific.
They made underwater paint. Specifically, anti
-fouling paint for ships. Right, an anti -fouling
composition for the hulls of naval warships.
Anti -fouling. That means keeping barnacles and
seaweed off. Exactly. You have to understand
the context. This was the era of the great naval
arms race before World War I. Every navy in Europe,
the British Royal Navy, the German Kaiserliche
Marine, the Italians, the Austrians, they were
all building massive steel dreadnoughts. Barnacles
are bad for business. Barnacles are a military
disaster. If they grow on the hull, it creates
drag. It slows the ship down and massively increases
fuel consumption. The Veneziani family had a
secret formula, a special toxic paint that prevented
this. It was a very lucrative, very important
military technology. So the failed poet, the
socialist writer, becomes a merchant of war paint.
And he was good at it. That's the funny part.
He didn't fail at business. He became a very
successful industrialist. He traveled to France,
to Germany, negotiating contracts with admirals
and businessmen. He became the boss. He was wealthy,
respected, and completely, utterly dead inside
regarding his art. This job eventually takes
him to London, doesn't it? Yes. The business
was expanding. The British Royal Navy was the
biggest client in the world, so the company set
up a factory in Charlton in southeast London.
And Svevo lived there for a while to oversee
operations. There's a blue plaque there now.
There is, at 67 Charlton Church Lane. It's amazing
to think of him there. I love the image of this
neurotic, intellectual, middle -aged Italian
man wandering around a Doherty in London. He
hated it. We have letters he wrote back to Livia.
He complained about everything. The food, the
weather, the constant... A total fish out of
water. Completely. He was a man of the Mediterranean
cafe culture, a man who loved to sit and talk
for hours, stuck in the smog of industrial London
where everyone was so proper. But this business
expansion, this need to deal with the British,
is what leads to the miracle. He needs to speak
better English. to sell the paint correct he's
back in trieste in 1907 he's doing more and more
business with the british admiralty and he realizes
his english is clunky it's functional but not
fluent he needs a private tutor so he goes to
the burlett school in trieste and asks for one
and who walks in the door a 25 year old impoverished
irishman disheveled probably hungover wearing
these thick glasses a young man named james joyce
this is the part of the story that feels scripted
It's unbelievable. You have a middle -aged, paint,
merchant, wealthy, respectable, wearing a suit,
and this young, unknown, genius in waiting, sitting
in a room, conjugating English verbs. And Joyce
was not a great man yet. That's vital to remember.
In 1907, he was struggling. He was drinking too
much. He was constantly broke, borrowing money
from everyone. He was working on Dubliners and
a portrait of the artist as a young man. But
he was essentially a nobody in Trieste. He was
just the English teacher. But they must have
clicked. It wasn't just about grammar. They bonded
immediately. They bonded over being outsiders.
Joyce was an Irishman in exile who hated the
Catholic Church and the provincial... So they
were both rebels in their own way. And they both
had this dark, ironic sense of humor. They were
both obsessed with literature. The lessons quickly
became less about English and more about talking
about Ibsen and Flaubert and philosophy. And
eventually the secret comes out. The secret that
this businessman used to be a writer. Svavo must
have been terrified. Imagine this. He respects
Joyce's intellect immensely. He sees this young
man as a true genius. And finally, one day, he
works up the courage to say, you know, I used
to write, I published these two old novels years
ago. They're gathering dust. Would you? Would
you mind taking a look? He probably expected
Joyce to laugh at him or to give him a play.
Oh, that's nice. And then just throw him in the
trash. Instead, Joyce took the books, read Una
Vida en Senolita, and was absolutely blown away.
He came back to the next lesson and told Svevo,
Do you know that you are a neglected writer?
There are passages in Senolita that even Anatole
France could not have written. Wow. Anatole France
was a Nobel Prize winner. That's high praise.
It was the highest praise. And that validation,
I can't even imagine what that felt like after
20 years of silence and failure. To have this
brilliant young man tell you that you were great
all along. It must have been like a resurrection.
It was the spark. Joyce didn't just teach him
English. He resurrected Italo Svevo. He validated
the very things the Italian critics had hated.
The critics hated the dryness, the lack of poetry,
the focus on internal psychology. Joyce saw that
Svevo wasn't bad at being traditional. He was...
good at being modern he saw the future in it
he saw the future of the novel in those failed
books he recognized a kindred spirit and the
influence went both ways Right. Joyce got something
out of this friendship, too. Something huge.
At this time, Joyce was outlining his great project,
Ulysses. He needed a protagonist, but not a hero
in the traditional sense. He needed a middle
-aged, Jewish, slightly neurotic, kind -hearted,
intellectually curious everyman. Leopold Bloom.
Leopold Bloom is largely based on Italo Svevo.
Really? Absolutely. The way Bloom thinks, his
curiosity about science, his domestic struggles,
his specific brand of ironic humor, his outsider
status. That's the paint merchant from Trieste.
So even if Sfavo never wrote another word, he
would be immortalized as the DNA of Leopold Bloom,
one of the most important characters in all of
literature. That is wild to think about. One
of the most famous characters in English literature
is actually a portrait of this obscure Italian
businessman who sold ship paint. It creates this
beautiful symmetry, doesn't it? They helped each
other become immortal. So Joyce lights the fire,
but it's not like he immediately runs off to
write. History intervenes again. World War I
happens. Right. And for a paint manufacturer
in a major naval port, war is complicated. The
city of Trieste is a battleground of loyalties.
The factory gets shut down by the Austrian authorities.
The Venezianis are seen as pro -Italian. The
Italians see them as Austrians. Sfavo finds himself
in this strange limbo. The business stops. And
suddenly, after decades of being too busy, He
has time. He has nothing but time. He's stuck
at home. He starts translating Freud's work on
dreams. He gets deeply into psychoanalysis. And
with Joyce's encouragement still ringing in his
ears, he starts writing again. And this time
it's different. It's 1919. He's almost 60 years
old. And he begins his masterpiece, La coscienza
di Zeno Zeno's Conscience. This book is the one.
It is the masterpiece. And it is completely different
from anything else being written at the time,
especially in Italy. He abandons the traditional
third -person storytelling of his early failures.
He adopts a first -person perspective. But it's
not just a diary. It's a medical document. Or
it pretends to be. Right. The framing device
is just fantastic. The book opens with a preface
written not by the author, Svevo, but by a psychoanalyst
who calls himself Dr. S. Dr. S is in Sigmund.
Or his fable. A little nod to both, probably.
And the doctor says, I am publishing these memoirs
of my patient, Zino Cossini, out of revenge because
he abruptly quit his therapy and stopped paying
me. That sets the tone perfectly. It's petty.
It's funny. It's malicious. It immediately frames
the entire book as an act of hostility and, most
importantly, unreliability. We are told from
page one that we cannot trust what we are about
to read. We are reading the private thoughts
of a man who is trying to lie to his doctor and
therefore to himself and to us. And this is where
the deep dive really needs to focus. Yeah. Because
Zeno's conscience isn't just a funny story. It's
a breakdown of the modern human mind. The main
character, Zeno Cassini, is rich, he's idle,
and he is obsessed with his own health and his
own morals. He is the archetype of the Inetto,
the inept one. This is a concept Svevo developed
throughout his work. The inept one is incapable
of living life directly. He can only analyze
it. He hesitates. He doubts. He overthinks everything.
He's paralyzed by his own consciousness. Exactly.
And his biggest struggle, the thread that runs
through the entire book, is his addiction to
smoking. The Ultima Cigaretta. The last cigarette.
Zeno goes to the doctor specifically to cure
his nicotine addiction. That's the stated goal
of the therapy. But as he explains his habit,
we realize that smoking isn't the problem. The
quitting is the problem. Break down the mechanism
for us. Because in the source material, there's
this fascinating paradox about why he smokes
the last one. Okay, so Zeno explains that the
most enjoyable cigarette is never the first one
of the day. It's always the last cigarette. Why?
Because when you smoke, what you decide is the
last one. You are making a profound promise to
yourself. This is it. New me starts now. After
this, I will be a new man. I will be strong,
healthy, disciplined. That moment of resolve
gives him a massive dopamine hit. He feels virtuous.
He feels powerful. It feels like he's conquered
himself without actually doing anything. Exactly.
He gets the reward of being a good person just
by making the decision. But then... Once you
finish that cigarette, the drama is over. The
thrill of becoming is gone. You are just being
a non -smoker. And Zeno can't stand being. He
needs to be becoming. So to get that feeling
of virtuous resolution back. He has to smoke
again. He has to fail. He lights up the 10 a
.m. cigarette so that the 11 a .m. cigarette
can be the glorious last one again. It creates
a perpetual loop of sin and repentance. It's
a self -sustaining addiction to virtue. That's
a brilliant way to put it. He writes dates on
the walls of his bedroom, in his office. Fourth
of June, 1905, last cigarette. Fifth of June,
1905, really the last cigarette. Seventh of June,
last cigarette important. The book is filled
with these entries. It's so relatable it hurts.
It's the diet that starts on Monday. It's the
gym membership we buy in January and use twice.
It is. Svavo, writing in 1919, identified that
modern man is addicted to the potential of the
future. We sacrifice the present moment because
we are obsessed with the better version of ourselves
that is always just around the corner. Zeno smokes
to keep that better version alive as a fantasy
rather than doing the hard work of actually changing.
And throughout the book, he applies this same
logic, the same ineptitude to everything. His
marriage, his business, his affairs. Yes. The
marriage plot is hilarious and so telling. He
decides he wants to marry into this respectable
family, Malfentis. He starts courting the most
beautiful daughter, Ada. She's serious and intelligent.
She rejects him brutally. Okay, plan B. He immediately
proposes to her younger sister, Alberta, who
is an aspiring writer. She just laughs at him.
So in a single evening, humiliated and desperate,
he ends up proposing to the third sister, Augusta.
Augusta is. The one no one else wants. Zeno finds
her ugly. She's cross -eyed. She's boring. He
proposes to her out of a kind of pity and self
-loathing. It's a total disaster. That sounds
tragic. But here is the brilliance of the book.
Augusta turns out to be the perfect wife for
him. She is grounded, healthy, practical, loving.
And Dino ends up having a surprisingly happy
life almost by accident. He drifts into happiness
while trying to sabotage himself. So it's not
a tragedy of failure, it's a comedy of accidental
success. That's the core of it. The book seems
to be arguing that being inept, being a bit of
a screw -up, might actually be a survival strategy
in a chaotic world. What do you mean by that?
Remember, this is written right after World War
I, where the strong and decisive and healthy
men of Europe led the continent into a slaughterhouse.
Zeno is sick, neurotic, indecisive. But the people
in the book who are rigid, the people who think
they have it all figured out, they break. Zeno,
who is flexible, who lies to himself, who drifts,
he survives. He is like a cork bobbing on the
ocean of life. He's a survivor because he doesn't
resist. So the book comes out in 1923. Suevo
is 61 years old. He has channeled Freud. He has
channeled his own life. He has written an undeniable
masterpiece. He put everything into this. Channel
nothing. Crickets. You have to be kidding me.
Again. Yeah. After all that. Again. The Italian
literary establishment completely ignored it.
They didn't get the joke. They didn't understand
the psychoanalysis Freud was still looked at
with deep suspicion in Catholic Italy. They thought
the book was rambling, unstructured, and once
again, poorly written. That is heartbreaking.
He must have thought, well, the universe just
doesn't want me to be a writer. That's three
strikes. He was ready to give up again. He was
resigned to his fate as the paint salesman who
wrote a weird book. But he had one last card
to play. He realized he had one connection left
in the literary world. His old student. He sent
a copy of the book to Paris to his old English
tutor. Joyce. By 1923, James Joyce was arguably
the most famous and infamous writer in the world.
Ulysses had been published the year before. He
was the toast of literary Paris. So Joyce receives
this book from his old friend in Trieste, and
he goes to work. What did he do? Just tell people
about it. He became a one -man PR machine. He
started telling all the influential French critics,
people like Valérie Larbeau and Benjamin Cremieux,
you have to read this book. This is a genius.
He basically forced them to pay attention. He
championed it. and he helped it translate it
into French. And the French reaction was different.
Night and day. The French critics, who were already
into Proust and psychoanalysis and the stream
of consciousness, they hailed it as a miracle.
They got it. They called it the Italian comedic
masterpiece. They compared him to Charlie Chaplin
and Marcel Proust. They saw the genius of the
introspection and the unreliability. And I assume
once Paris loved it, Italy suddenly changed its
tune. That is exactly how it works in the art
world, isn't it? It's called the Svevo case,
the Casso Svevo. Suddenly, the Italian critics,
led by the very influential poet Eugenio Montale,
were like, oh, yes, we knew he was great all
along, a hidden master. They were shamed into
recognizing him. Totally. If Paris says it's
good, it must be good. So suddenly, at the age
of 65, Svevo was famous. So he finally gets his
moment. He travels to Paris. He's celebrated
at dinners. People are calling him a genius.
He enjoyed a few years of incredible celebrity.
He finally merged the two halves of his life.
The businessman and the writer were one person.
He was affectionately known as the grand old
man of Italian literature. It's a wonderful late
-in -life success story. But we have to talk
about the end, because for a man whose work was
all about the irony of death and the last cigarette,
his actual death is almost too perfect, too literary.
It is the final chapter of the novel, really.
It's 1928. He's working on a fourth novel, a
sequel to Zeno. He's driving back to Trieste
with his wife and grandson. And there's a car
crash. A bad one. He was injured severely, a
broken femur. He is taken to a hospital in a
small town called Malta di Livenza. His health
deteriorates rapidly. His old man's heart can't
take the shock. He knows he's dying. He's lying
there. He's in pain, struggling to breathe. And
he realizes he's dying. And he makes one last
request. He asks his nephew for a cigarette.
Yes. A visitor, his nephew, is by his bedside
and he whispers, a cigarette. And the nephew.
The nephew, trying to be responsible, says, no,
uncle, it will be bad for your heart. The doctor
says, no. Denied. And Svavo looks at him with
that typical wry, ironic smile and whispers his
last words, that would have been my last. And
then he dies. It gives me chills. He was denied
the final ritual, the ultimate, ultimate cigarette.
It is the supreme irony. The man who spent 50
years celebrating the last cigarette as a concept
never actually got to smoke the real one. He
died with the desire still unfulfilled. Which
is, in a way... The most Zeno way to go. Absolutely.
It fits his philosophy perfectly. Life is incomplete.
Life is about desire, not fulfillment. We are
always interrupted before the final act. I want
to zoom out a bit and look at his legacy. Because
today, he's a giant in Italy. There are statues
of him, schools named after him. But there's
another aspect of his life we haven't touched
on much. His politics. We said he was a socialist,
but he was also a wealthy industrialist. How
did he reconcile that? It's another one of the
great Svivo contradictions. While he was managing
the paint factory and becoming rich, he was still
a Marxist at heart. But his socialism was less
about violent revolution and more about a kind
of humanistic pacifism. He'd seen war up close.
He saw World War I destroy his city. Trieste
was shattered by it. He saw the absurdity of
nationalism, of Italians and Austrians killing
each other. So his political thinking became
about how to prevent that from ever happening
again. The notes mentioned he had a very specific
idea about Europe's future. Yes, and this is
incredibly forward -thinking. Long before the
European Union was even a dream, Svevo argued
that the only way to stop the fighting was economic
integration. He advocated for a United States
of Europe. A common market. He believed that
if nations traded with each other, shared currencies,
and became economically interdependent, they
wouldn't bomb each other. It was a banker's solution
to a human problem, but it was incredibly prescient
for the 1920s. It seems like he was always ahead
of his time. He was doing Freudian fiction before.
before the Italians knew who Freud was. He was
talking about a European Union before the EU.
He was writing about alienation and the fragmented
self before the existentialists made it cool.
He was a man out of time, and I think that's
why he resonates so much today. When you read
Zeno's Conscience now, it doesn't feel like a
100 -year -old book at all. Zeno feels like a
modern neurotic. He feels like us. He feels like
me at 2 a .m. scrolling through my phone, promising
myself I'll have a productive day tomorrow. Exactly.
We are all Zeno. We are all full of good intentions
and bad follow through. We are all constantly
constructing these narratives to explain to ourselves
why we aren't quite who we want to be yet. So
if we step back, what is the big takeaway here
from this whole incredible life? Is it just...
Don't give up. Don't give up is part of it. I
mean, the man wrote his masterpiece at 60. That's
hugely inspiring for anyone who feels like they've
missed their chance. But I think the deeper lesson
is about what you called the accidental masterpiece.
What do you mean by that? Sveba thought his life
was a series of failures. He failed as a writer,
which forced him to become a banker. The bank
was a dead end, so he accidentally married into
the paint business. The paint business was a
distraction from his art, but it forced him to
learn English. Which led him to Joyce. Which
led him to Joyce, who then told him his failures
were actually successes. Every single one of
those wrong turns was a necessary step on the
path. That's like a puzzle. You can't see the
picture until the last piece fits. Yeah, exactly.
If he had succeeded at 20, he would have written
mediocre traditional novels and we would have
never heard of him. He needed the failure. He
needed the drudgery of the bank. He needed the
silence to gestate and become the real Italo
Svevo. And he needed the last cigarette as his
lifelong theme. He needed the struggle. The struggle
was the art. The tension between the man he was.
and the man he wanted to be, that's where the
genius came from. That's a beautiful way to think
about it. Which brings me to a final thought
for our listeners. Zeno Cassini believed he could
constantly restart his life by quitting smoking.
In our modern age of self -optimization, you
know, New Year's resolutions, life hacks, the
new year, new me mentality, I wonder if we aren't
all a bit like Zeno. Are we addicted to the actual
change or are we just addicted to the exhilarating
feeling of deciding to start over without ever
having to do the hard work? A provocative question.
Are we just smoking one cigarette after another
just to enjoy the thrill of putting it out? It's
something to think about. Indeed it is. So, find
your own Ultima cigarette a moment, but maybe
actually quit this time. Thank you all for listening
to this deep dive. It's been a pleasure. We'll
see you on the next one.