The Genoa Dialogues

By J. Hayes Hurley

An existentialist philosopher, Jack Ireland, is invited to Genoa, Italy, to search for a packet of missing letters supposedly left in a grand palazzo by Nietzsche in the 19th Century. He ends up living in the palazzo as tutor to a cognitive challenged aristocratic boy. What could be the value of philosophy for this child? What is it touches all human souls?

J. Hayes Hurley is novelist, a philosopher, and a philosophical novelist. He is the author of The Diary of the Attending Rays, Those Brownsville Blues, and Leaving Lisbon. The Genoa Dialogues is his 18th novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Dec 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483420981

J. Hayes Hurley

J. Hayes Hurley is the author of 93 novels, including "The Turtle Bay Novels," "Those Brownsville Blues," and "The Adjunct."As well, Hurley holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University.

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Copyright © 2014 J. Hayes Hurley.

Cover Art by Douglas Leichter

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ISBN: 978-1-4834-2099-8 (sc)

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 12/10/2014

THE GENOA DIALOGUES

B efore he died my father told me that if Caravaggio was alive in this century he would demand the right to paint me.

Ecce Homo.

Not Christ, Jack. Me.

I understand that; though you would have been better served by a Flemish artist. Roger Vander Weyden would have flattered you, making your pale skin shine like spiritual light.

My father wanted me to be painted by the Italian master.

Then Raphael …

He said Caravaggio.

Well, Robby, your father was right on one point. You are a fine looking boy. In the Nineteenth Century your picture could have appeared on posters selling farina.

I am not merely handsome, Jack. My character emerges from within, coming to rest upon my surface. Don’t you see that?

I haven’t the eyes of Caravaggio.

Use your own.

If you insist. You have a perfectly rounded head sitting on a soft, oval body. Your hair, though worn long, is translucent; one thinks of a blond-headed ghost. Your eyes are as milky-blue as the sky over Genoa this morning; it would be an artistic privilege to capture those bellflower discs. Your nose is a button, your mouth a slice of rhubarb. Your narrow shoulders slope so gracefully that your chest and belly form a single egg. Your legs are short and sturdy; your knees are cannonballs.

I do not limp like you.

That you do not.

You waste my time describing my physique, Jack. I asked for a character assessment.

Your carriage is aristocratic. Your attitude holds a middle place between amusement and arrogance. You have a noble bearing, even though, being physically short, you have to glance upward to look down on people. Your manners put mine to shame; you have centuries of breeding to fall back upon while I hail from the ahistorical democratic mass. Your unconscious assumption of class superiority automatically carries weight since it radiates from you’re goodness; I confess to being disarmed by your deft Italian hand gestures regardless of the fact that your right hand invariably clutches your smartphone, and also by the ease with which you lend your presence to whatever space is ‘out there.’ You are graceful by definition, Robby.

Nice try, Jack. But you describe upper class mannerisms in general. You say nothing particular about me.

You expect me to describe your unique personality along with your character, Robby."

I am asking.

That would be difficult if not impossible.

Why so?

Because whatever I say about you could be attributed to a specific class of people. That is a limitation of language. It cannot capture you.

Try anyway.

"Robby … be satisfied with this. Your singular personality is accessible to me in all its wonder. Enough said."

You are making fun of me, Jack.

On the contrary, Robby, it is you who finds me droll.

Caravaggio would have captured my singularity with his paints. Why can’t you do so with your words?

I am still learning about you, Robby. Give me time.

Am I not all here at once?

Yes and no.

Why no?

Robby! We need to get on with your lessons now.

Must we, Jack?

That is why I am here.

My school book is open before us. Proceed.

OK, Robby. We will look at this page together, the one on the left.

We always look at that one.

So we will again. You see that it contains four pictures. There is a cat, a dog, a rabbit, and a boat.

You called it a yacht last time.

Boat … yacht, whatever. The question for you is, which of these four pictures is different from the other three?

Jack?

Can you tell me, Robby, which picture is different?

The boy fell silent. There appeared on his face a smile of contentment along with a look of profound indifference. Despite the fact that his vocabulary is extraordinary given his age, falling into that mysterious gap between precociousness and genius, he could not answer the question but he knew this: I was just the hired help. After a few seconds, during which he stared into his smartphone, not finding the page in the book open before him, for it had not been scanned, he got up and strolled out through a doorway, leaving me sitting alone in the chaotic, dusty library of the Palazzo Elena just off the Via Garibaldi in Genoa, Italy.

The room overwhelms eye and mind. Books from the 16th Century on down are carelessly assembled on shelves, while others are heaped on the floor, on the furniture, on the windowsills, on the moveable steps, and on fireplace mantels. Freestanding stacks rise up towards the twenty-foot ceiling like Echerian nightmares. There never was any attempt made by anyone in the Elena line to catalogue let alone systematically shelve these treasures, and what is worse, both this room and the smaller library rooms are jammed with more books, loose papers, withered notebooks, and odd, indecipherable scribbling on napkins.

I haven’t yet begun to explore the main library let alone the annexes. What I have experienced so far has nothing to do with architecture, or with the history of Genoa, but is confined to my own dreary interior. Here at the palazzo members of the Elena family, some long dead, some dead more recently, haunt its hallways like passing drafts of air, subjecting me to sudden bouts of melancholia. Here footfalls mimic the rote murmuring of elderly believers chanting their rosaries in nearby churches. Here the courtyard is eerily silent, its plants bowed under an unexplained oppression. Up on the ceilings frescos, preserved here, ground away there, leave me feeling doleful. I imagine the hard marble floor slabs turning spongy.

The rooms of this palazzo remain gloomy in the strongest light, while my bedroom, though undeniably large and sumptuously furnished, reminds me of a renovated space in a two star hotel. My window opens onto a street where fish is sold and where all day through is heard a beautiful soprano voice singing arias. I thought this was a recording loop until I found it to be the voice of a beggar woman. She sings almost without pause, day after day, with perfect pitch, though I have yet to see anyone drop so much as a single euro into the cup by her feet. Altogether I am surrounded by opulence, though sometimes I have the impression I am living in the Zoppé Circus instead of the Palazzo Elena. But that is unfair. I must not let this dark mood rule me. I must conjoin my wistful present to a truncated version of my autobiographical past.

–

I, Jack Ireland, will not bore the reader with a recounting of the first three decades of my life. Suffice to say that from childhood on I valued my leisure over all else. I wanted to think and I wanted to be; I did not distinguish thinking and being. Yet I was not born into a life of leisure; I had to do whatever I could to avoid being snared forever by its opposite. I finished graduate school in philosophy at age thirty to become known in academic circles as someone who did serious Nietzsche scholarship, sub-specializing in his collected letters. A top university hired me and I was dubbed as a leading Nietzschean scholar; though of course the value of that sort of academic honor depends on what anthology you consult. The bare truth about scholarship in general is that if you are, say, a noted Nietzschean then it follows that you are not Nietzsche! The same goes for every other luminary. Platonists are not Plato, Aristotelians are not Aristotle, and so forth.

In my third year as an academic, and continuously harried by the need to grind out papers, I met a young woman named Natalie, an anthropologist working at the university where I taught. We fell passionately in love and became engaged to marry. We talked about our love in fiery terms; we insisted that we were eternally consumed. We were driving to the campus one morning under ideal weather conditions when a teenager ran a red light and crashed into the right side of my car, killing Natalie and pinning me in the vehicle. While I waited for a rescue crew to extricate me from the twisted steel using a blowtorch, Natalie’s teeth spilled onto my face like so many blood-spattered pearls. All I suffered was a crushed right leg and a shattered soul.

I must say that there is nothing like the proximate death of a loved one to project a person into a transitional phase. I grew cynical about the value of the life I was leading and aware of how different it was from my childhood dream. I was turning into an academic grub. This sent me scurrying, or I should say hobbling over to my keyboard where, in one great creative burst, I parodied my own academic specialty, writing a Candide-like, faux-biography of Nietzsche, calling it The Anti-Existentialist. I had no intention of sending it out but I did. To my utter surprise, and to my department’s bemusement, it became a popular book.

Subsequently I was invited on a modest European book tour to Sils-Maria, Nice, Turin, and finally Genoa, squeezing the trip in during the university spring break. In Genoa, at a book signing, I met the Conte Luigi Elena, a banker in his mid-sixties with a book collector’s hobby, a man who looked every inch an aristocrat and whose manners were impeccable. Physically, he was short and rounded, and like so many men one observes in Liguria, he was bald. I would have done little more than shake his hand and turn to the next person in line when, unexpectedly, Luigi told me he had recently lost his wife, the Contessa, and his son, Roberto, the Conte to be, in a traffic accident. Hearing this I was immediately overcome with tears. We huddled together after the signing and comforted one another.

Once this exchange of sympathies was exhausted the Conte drew me into a conversation about my professional work. Being emotionally vulnerable I told him everything. I confessed to being disillusioned with scholarship though I was still a scholar. I told him I had ambitions of leaving academia and going off on my own just as Nietzsche had, but that university duties took up all my time. I then told him my biggest secret, that I valued leisure above all else but lacked an independent income. The Conte asked,

Leisure to do what, Jack?

I had no ready answer to this. So I made an appeal to pathos.

The loss of my fiancé leaves me in intolerable pain, Conte. I go days without sleep. I get up out of bed and pour over Nietzsche’s letters, something I have done for years, but lately they seen written in a language I cannot decipher.

Your book is hilarious.

Apparently. My publisher has offered me the chance to write a string of parodies on other thinkers.

Ah. You will sign a contract to do that?

I told him I am not interested.

What does interest you?

That is a good question.

If you stay put you will gain tenure.

True.

Is that what you want?

I felt the man’s eyes upon me. I knew that what I said next would sound pretentious but I went ahead regardless.

If my duties were reduced, if I had my hours free, it would give me the opportunity to be an original thinker.

Having said this my cheeks burned. But the Conte, who now told me to call him Luigi, asked, in a very gentle voice,

Try to express for me what it is that would make you an original thinker … like Nietzsche … and not just another Nietzschean scholar with few duties.

Such a direct question put me on the defensive. I do not appreciate questions posed to me by amateurs. But this man, and Natalie’s death, drew me on and my tongue went on ahead of my brain.

I wonder whether the human species is at bottom no different than any other animal species that comes and goes within nature, doing so generation after generation.

Isn’t that exactly what we do, Jack?

On one level, yes.

Luigi nodded his head. He thought he knew where I was headed.

Yet humans have consciousness while animals do not.

I am not interested in human consciousness. I am interested in intellect.

The Conte’s eyes flashed for a moment. He said to me, speaking very slowly,

What about the human intellect?

"How does one use it? Does one only use it to get around on this earth pragmatically? Or can one as well use the intellect to search for some sort of transcendent existence? Let me be clear here. I am talking about an intellectual search for transcendence, not just an expression of blind religious faith."

The Conte, who now hung on every word I said, replied shrewdly.

You call yourself an existentialist. Those are people who unblinkingly stare and life and death. But, and in addition, you want to juxtapose your existentialism over against a search for oneness that, and by definition, goes beyond the human. You hedge your bets, Jack. Am I right?

He sat there waiting for me to defend myself. I could not. After a long moment he said this.

You speak of the human intellect, Jack. Do you include all of us in that?

All humans have intellects, yes.

Then it is the case that philosophers gather all humans up into a single category?

"Well … no. They only value high intelligence."

The Conte pounced on this. In fact he seemed to have been waiting for me to say this.

"So, a human being with low intelligence would be relegated to the basement of the existential category, while at the same time being told that there is no hope of seeking transcendence. The implication being that his or her existence is doubly meaningless."

How is that?

"Such a person would, while still being a person, be incapable of conducting even a fruitless search for transcendence while on their way to death along with the rest of us. Plus he or she would end up being labeled as impaired on this one earth."

Our conversation ended shortly after that.

–

Back at my university I was out of sorts. I wanted more than ever to quit teaching, wander about this world, or at least through Europe, spending the rest of my life thinking philosophically without having to teach. But, and again, I could not afford to leave my university post with all the nagging academic duties that came with it. So I reached a temporary compromise, I arranged for a responsibility-free summer where I would just think the sorts of thoughts I wanted to think while not worrying about fitting my conclusions into academic journals with an eye on gaining tenure. I knew it would be for only a little over three months but it was better than nothing.

While I was looking into arrangements for the summer I was surprised by a phone call from the Conte Elena. During our conversation Luigi told me something that immediately drew my suspicion. He claimed that his great-grandfather had met Nietzsche when Nietzsche was in Genoa in the early 1880’s. He further claimed that the German accepted an invitation to spend some days at the Elena Palazzo. I had no reaction to this: as a scholar I know of no evidence of such doings on Nietzsche’s part. Furthermore I wondered why the Conte had not mentioned this Nietzsche connection when we met in Genoa.

Just before I embarked on my summer trip, still with no firm