A few years ago I took my extremely fucked up secondhand Hyundai Sonata to a local auto body shop to get inspected. The place was called Nelson’s and it had a lot of what you call “character;” probably the best testament to this is that right now, as we speak, the space is being transformed into a coffee shop. But at that point it was an auto shop, and because it had been in operation for something like 75 years the waiting room boasted an incredible amount of bric a brac - little statues of golfing men, Ziggy cartoons clipped out of newspapers from before I was born, inscrutable plaques. Right before I left the car for the long walk back to my house I noticed, printed on a sheet of paper, the following words:

“If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change” 
– Giuseppe di Lampedusa 

In an astounding coincidence I had just finished the novel from which these words are pulled, di Lamepedusa’s The Leopard, the evening prior, and was existing in that kind of excitedly limber state that takes hold after you’ve just completed a new favorite novel, and I thought about this coincidence, and this quote, on the long walk home.

The majority of The Leopard takes place during the unification of Italy by Garibaldi’s Redshirts and follows Don Fabrizio Corbèra, one of the innumerable aristocratic princes, as he attempts to maintain his life and status during a time of political and social upheaval; the line itself is spoken by his forward-thinking nephew, Tancredi, who later joins the Redshirts and becomes a politician in his own right.

When I returned to pick up my car, I asked the owner if he had read the book. Oh no, he told me, a friend of mine just printed that quotation out and gave it to me, because it’s something I’m always saying.

I thanked him, paid for the inspection and drove away. And the thing that stuck in my head was, but the quote is wrong.

I had wanted to discuss it with someone who had read the book because Tancredi’s plan to change with the times very explicitly doesn’t work - the era of aristocrats like Don Fabrizio is over, although no-one really knows it yet, and the liberalizing efforts that he attempts - on Tancredi’s suggestions - don’t forestall the end. If anything, Don Fabrizio’s gestures towards democracy and equality disturb those lower than him on the social scale. Eventually Don Fabrizio dies, his line ends, his name is forgotten, his relics and ideas discarded. There’s even a Wikipedia page for this concept which refers to it as the “di Lampedusa doctrine,” only noting at the end that it’s not actually something di Lampedusa thought.

We ask a lot of the German language, conceptually, but I do wonder if anyone has Frankenstein’d together a word yet for the situation where a work of art attempts to subvert an idea but in the process illustrates the same idea so succinctly that it becomes a watchword for it. In Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken both roads are explicitly described as equal, and the final famous lines - I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference - are a premonition of the self-aggrandizement we indulge in as we get older - but those are the lines we put in our high school yearbooks. The one wild and precious life that Mary Oliver writes about in The Summer Day is, in the poem itself, best spent lazing in the grass; on LinkedIn it’s maximizing shareholder value.

But you understand how it happens. We need words to express our sentiments, even if they’re the banal or trite ones, and if a poet or author happens to package those sentiments perfectly we’ll use those words, even if they’re were originally in the process of skewering them.

I realized that the music recommendations I made in my first newsletter didn’t make it over to the last one - every day is a new tradition.

I mentioned the Chicken Chokers last time, and this Michael Hurley cover is really tremendous - kind of pointing to a weird, malevolent folk-American cosmology. I had started writing a much longer thing here, about a defunct cassette-only folk music record label, and a little good news for once. But it got too long, and so it’ll be next week’s little missive. Thank you again.