160
PARTISAN REVIEW
everyone has the death he deserves. Their day will come too . .. Not
everything can be explained. But always remember that monsters do
not die. What dies is the fear they inspire. So with the gods: when
men no longer fear them, they will vanish.
Their vanishing, one might theorize, happened by way of a transub–
stantiation. They became their legends, their myths, and as these, too,
lose potency - as they are forgotten - their fabled might all but disap–
pears. They again become what they were at first: the paradigmatic forms
of our experience, our longings, our imaginings.
The last dialogue, "The Muses," gathers such intimations and gives
them form. We read the piece as an account of the passing of the torch
from gods to men, but it is also Pavese's summary articulation of the
place of the mythic. The exchange is between Mnemoseyne (also called
Melete) and Hesiod, first of the line of poets:
MNEMOSEYNE: ... Don't you understand that man, every man , is
born in that swamp of blood? That the sacred and divine are with
you too? In the bed, in the fields before the fire? In everything you
do, you renew a divine model. Day and night, there is not an instant,
not even the most futile, which has not sprung from the silence of
your ongms.
HESIOD: You speak, Melete, and I cannot help believing. Only let
me adore you.
MNEMOSEYNE: You have another alternative.
HESIOD: What is that?
MNEMOSEYNE: Try telling mortals the things you know.
This is the task, the high responsibility, that Pavese took upon him–
self. His
Dialogues With Leuco,
grave and mysterious, will never be a pop–
ular work. But it is - and I would say this of very few other books of
our time - a repository of human wisdom and the anguish that earns it.
SVEN
BIRKERTS
