Don Miguel Ruiz

I've read quite a number of books by Don Miguel Ruiz but The Four Agreements is the core of his teaching. If you live by these four principles you can live a happy, rich, harmonious life. It's simple, although not that easy to do. Don Miguel Ruiz was born in rural Mexico in a family of healers who introduced him to the Toltec knowledge. Ruiz decided to study medicine instead and became a surgeon. Later in life he went back to the teachings of his family, distilled it from its supertitious aspects and now teaches and publishes his philosophy of life in a clear and poetical style. Here are the 4 agreements as explained in his own words on his website:

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

2. Don't Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

3. Don't Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

I find them beautiful and I try to apply them to my life.

2 books set in Venice

Another book by Alain Elkann is Il Tuffo (The Dive) which I don't believe is translated into English. This time the settings are New York and Venice and the main character is a mysterious composer of classical music, first seen through the eyes of an Italian ambassador who tries to be friends with him, then, in the second part, through his letters and finally through third person narration. Sergio Pontremoli, the protagonist, reminds me of Huysman's Des Esseints, in the way that he stages and paints his own demise. Venice and its dreamy elements of fog, cold winter and timelessness are the perfect framing for the ultimate dive.
The second book is Venice Revealed by Paolo Barbaro. Again, I've read this in Italian but by the comments on amazon it looks like it has been translated very well into English. The work is divided in chapters that are sort of narrative essays about the beauty and troubles of Venice, how pollution affects the local flora and fauna, how the lagoon reflects all the colours and all the poisons. You can smell, feel and touch Venice through this book, meet its real inhabitants and discover its gems and wounds.

Alain Elkann

Born in 1950 in New York from a French father and an Italian mother, Alain Elkann married and divorced Margherita Agnelli (daughter of). He's a well known journalist in Italy, I am told, I don't know, I've lived in England for too long. I discovered him because he was next to Umberto Eco on the library shelf. Elkann was a pupil of Moravia's and wrote his biography - the English translation is entitled Life of Moravia. I read in Italian Piazza Carignano, about a young author who lives between London, New York and Turin. Together with his new girlfriend, a French dancer, he discovers letters and diaries of a deceased Uncle who was a Jewish fascist. The theme of Jewish culture and religion is very dear to Elkann and he treats it from unusual and interesting angles. There's another novel of his translated into English, Misguided Lives. I haven't read it yet.

Castaneda - The art of dreaming etc

The art of dreaming, A separate reality, and Journey to Ixtlan. This is the order in which I read them. I decided to read Castaneda after discovering the books by Don Miguel Ruiz, that I will review at some stage in the future. Of course I had heard of Carlos Castaneda many times before but it always conjured a displeasing image of the lysergic Sixties. It was, instead, a real revelation for me, and so well related to everything else I've been intrigued with in recent times, like the astral plain, different realities, meditation, etc. I don't know who Don Juan was nor, for that matter, who Castaneda himself was, and it looks like it's going to stay that way. Here's my opinion. Castaneda has a most beautiful, lucid mind, he leads you with a sure hand into the most intriguing, scary, emotional dimensions. Like a real sorcerer he can manipulate your feelings, elate you and terrify you. Was his work non fiction or fiction? Was Don Juan real? Could you follow his teachings - but those were the teachings for Carlos, for you they may be very different. It doesn't matter. To learn, I believe, is what we are here for. How we learn is irrelevant. What surprises me, though, is that an author who sold millions in the 70s managed to escape the attention of any serious biographer. Is it me? I haven't found anything about his life that doesn't itself contain fiction, in the form of biographies written by his reincarnations, and the like. There was some criticism of his work by a number of anthropologists and some weird rumours surrounding his life post late 1970s. Apparently some of his followers were found dead, perhaps suicide, in the desert and, also apparently, he was preaching suicide. Why, what happened? Can anybody enlighten me?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - Umberto Eco

Yambo, a sixty year old rare book dealer who lives in Milan wakes up in a hospital bed and realizes he has lost his memory or rather his autobiographical memory. His semantic memory is still there, he knows who Caesar and Napoleon were, but not who he is, he can recite every poem he's ever read but doesn't recognise his wife or daughters. His wife suggests that in order to recover his memory he should go to their house in the country in search of his past . Yambo spends a long time in the house going through all the old books and comics and magazines stored there, trying to remember, trying to make sense of it all.
Yambo was sixty in the 1990s so he was a few years younger than my parents but many of the books and comics he mentions were also in my house when I was a child and I grew up with those book covers, some of the music he mentions and other things and images so well illustrated here. And the themes and stories, how strange it was to be a kid in the Mussolini era, listening to patriotic anthems and then to light tunes, reading about Balilla and then rushing to buy Mickey Mouse. I read the book in Italian, of course, and I cannot even imagine how hard it must have been to render it in English. American and English and to certain degrees French culture have been acquired by the common memory/imagination bank through films and literature and music, but the Italy described in Eco's book is so intimate to us who were there. One of the pictures is an illustration taken, I think, from a 1915 edition of Pinocchio. Of course Pinocchio was one of the texts children read in elementary school and I had my own copy, with a red cover and the face of Pinocchio in felt on the front. It also looks like Eco and I read the same comic magazine, called Corriere dei Piccoli with the most fabulous array of characters including a little girl with a cat called Ferraù who used to fly around the world in a bath tub. A non-Italian will like this book because of Eco's amazing talent and knowledge, but to me it was reliving my own life in a day.

Reading

This on my left is Ernest Hemingway's study in Key West. I've made it into a digital water colour picture and hung it in my study on the left of my computer's monitor. I believe that libraries generate libraries, that a thread of thought becomes a network, where more titles and dreams are read, lived and created. So here's a logbook of my readings. I hope to inspire you to read some of the books I've chosen, but I also hope to be given some more threads, some more paths to follow in this infinite adventure.