Francis Galffing
THE ALEXANDRIAN MIND:
NOTES TOWARD A DEFINITION
Nature has given man the power to destroy himself–
a power which keeps increasing in proportion to his
hunger for life, as the latter rushes away from him day
by day. Once our power of destruction grows infinite-–
so that the moment of our birth spells our own funeral
-our hunger for life too will become boundless; quite
naturally so, because we have never been alive.
-SILVIO TISSI,
L'Ironia Leopardina
(
If
we read the state of mind of the modem Greek as a
metaphor for the attitudes of modem Western man (and poetry of
such probity and range as that of C. P. Cavafyl encourages us to do
this ) we shall be furnished with a map, as complete as we could
wish, of our contemporary preoccupations. That state of mind may be
defined, indifferently, as Byzantine or Alexandrian; but since the poet
himself would doubtless have preferred the latter term, and since
that term has the further advantage of having passed long since into
common speech, I shall employ it in the following discourse.
The epithet
Alexandrian,
used loosely enough nowadays, though
perhaps never without a certain show of justice, seems hardly to re–
quire much explanation. It describes the temper of a time-any time
-consequent upon the flowering of strict value systems; the attitude
entertained, most clearly by the best minds and dimly by the rest,
in the face of that irregular luxuriance which one knows, now, to
have been one's past- inherited, yes, but neither wholly nor quite
purely enough; and earned, as one might earn a punishment. For,
by the constant irony of history, this is what our richest rewards must
1 Constantine Cavafy was born
in
Alexandria in 1863. Most of his life
was spent in government jobs: a calling which may explain both the bias and
the references of many of his poems. He started his literary career about 1908 and
continued writing steadily until his death in 1933; published little and that
little privately. He is now generally regarded as the foremost Greek poet of
this century. His poems have been translated by John Mavrogordato and were
published here in 1952 by the Grove Press.
