Zeno's Conscience summary

Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo (real name - Ettore Schmitz)
Translation by William Weaver

Sorrow and love—life, in other words—cannot be considered a sickness because they hurt.

The fictional autobiography and journal of Zeno Cosini proves to be full of comic contradictions, highlighting his own unreliability. Yet Zeno can be observant and perceptive, although not always at the same time. As he says at one point about his abilities, “For all my efforts I achieved the result of that marksman who hit the bullseye, but of the target next to his.” What gives Zeno’s ‘writings’ additional meaning centers on why he’s keeping these journals: he is following the orders of his analyst, supposedly helping cure himself through this exercise. Except…Zeno thinks psychoanalysis is a fraud and makes him sicker. He resists any help from his analyst while laughing at the diseases ascribed to him. In addition, Zeno believes "A confession in writing is always a lie.” So what are we to make of his book-length confession, the ramblings of his conscience?

In the end Svevo has his character turn on much of what he wrote earlier, all but declaring psychoanalysis a false religion. Fortunately Zeno can declare (and believe in) his innocence and ultimately his health, eventually exercising the freedom he incorrectly believed he had to this point. Even at the end of the book Zeno invests himself in his ultimate passion—confession.

I highly recommend this deceptively simple appearing celebration of an ordinary and convoluted life. There are slow spots, but even they add dimensions to the conclusion. One aspect of its appeal is captured in Joseph Epstein’s review:

Svevo's subject is the weakness of the will, or abulia, and how a dreamy nature has little chance up against the temptations set out by the amazing and obdurate reality of life. In "Zeno's Conscience," Zeno Cosini, an unexceptional Trieste businessman, pits his will against the enslaving habit of smoking, the complexities of courtship, the delights of philandery, the discipline required by business, and loses every time, yet cannot quite be said to go down in defeat.

My posts per chapter:

Smoke

My Father's Death

The Story of My Marriage

Wife and Mistress

The Story of My Marriage

Psychoanalysis

Zeno’s Conscience: Psychoanalysis

I had put myself in the doctor’s hands with such trust that when he told me I was cured, I believed him completely and, on the contrary, I didn’t believe in my pains, which still afflicted me. I said to them: “You’re not real, after all!” But now there can be no doubt! It’s them, all right! The bones in my legs have been converted into vibrant scales that hurt the flesh and the muscles.
…
My therapy was supposedly finished because my sickness had been discovered. It was nothing but the one diagnosed, in his day, by the late Sophocles for poor Oedipus. I had loved my mother and I would have liked to kill my father. … The best proof that I never had the sickness is supplied by the fact that I am not cured of it.

Svevo saves his most scathing comments about psychoanalysis for this concluding chapter, likening it to a religion intended to highlight the pain of the past as a way to endure the present. Zeno’s journal entries make fun of the dreams he told his therapist, both real and invented, as well as the reeducation imposed on him. Zeno realizes the therapist avoids the obvious: “I believe, however, that he is the only one in this world who, hearing I wanted to go to bed with two beautiful women, would ask himself: Now let’s see why this man wants to go to bed with them.”

Zeno, fed up with his therapist, visits the family doctor seeking scientific analysis instead of spiritualism. At the possibility he has diabetes, Zeno sinks into a reverie—finally, a sickness he can love and savor. Finding out he doesn’t have diabetes, he confesses he feels “very much alone” and abandoned. He avoids memories and dreams for fear of what psychoanalysis has done to him. But then something miraculous happens, if Zeno can be believed…a very big “if.” His health improves, he quits smoking (even if temporarily), and enjoys his life and family. He feels healthy, not just relatively but absolutely. His outlook on life changes: “Sorrow and love—life, in other words—cannot be considered a sickness because they hurt.”

Naturally I am not ingenuous, and I forgive the doctor for seeing life itself as a manifestation of sickness. Life does resemble sickness a bit, as it proceeds by crises and lyses, and has daily improvements and setbacks. Unlike other sicknesses, life is always fatal. It doesn’t tolerate therapies. It would be like stopping the holes that we have in our bodies, believing them wounds. We would die of strangulation the moment we were treated.

Zeno’s improvement and maturation feel a little contrived—Zeno the sage, after all the pages of his comic contradictions, seems quite a stretch and more like Svevo’s lecturing to the reader. Two things help counter some of those feelings. The first comes in the realization, or maybe it’s just hope, that Zeno hasn’t changed completely and some of the essential “Zeno-ish” still resides in him. The second comes from the imposition of World War I, impacting his life directly as well as giving him the opportunity to mature (even if forced on him).

Still, the last two pages feel like Svevo’s preaching about the pollution of present-day life where sickness flourishes as man “becomes increasingly shrewd and weaker.” I think it’s easy to read too much into the last paragraph, especially since it runs counter to almost everything preceding it. Even so, it highlights the possible outcomes of sickness or life:

Perhaps, through an unheard-of catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. When poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness.

Zeno’s Conscience: The Story of a Business Partnership

We were neither good nor bad, just as we were also not many other things. Goodness was the light that, in flashes and for moments, illuminated the dark human spirit. The flaming torch was necessary to give light (it had been in my spirit, and sooner or later it would also return), and in that brightness any thinking person could choose the direction in which to move through the ensuing darkness. We could therefore show ourselves to be good, very good, always good, and this was what mattered. When the light returned, it would not take us by surprise, it would not dazzle. I would blow on it to put it out first, since I had no need of it. Because I would know how to maintain the resolution, in other words, the direction. The resolution to be good is calm and practical, and now I was calm and cold. Strange! The excess of goodness had made me excessive in estimating myself and my power.

Zeno constantly overestimates himself and it has little to do with his excess of goodness. This long chapter follows Zeno and his brother-in-law Guido in their attempt at running a business. There isn’t much new in the way of themes that I have already mentioned in previous posts on Svevo’s book, but this chapter took on a much darker tone than I had noticed (or maybe had wanted to notice) in earlier ones. There will be some spoilers in what follows, but I don’t feel guilty (shades of Zeno!) since Svevo telegraphs what will happen.

Guido becomes undone by himself, family, friends, and fate. Guido’s lack of discipline and tenacity degrades his professional and personal life. In many ways, Guido resembles Zeno except he lacks the resolve of good intentions—does this mean good intentions are worth more than I give them credit? Business proves to be a harsh task for both Guido and Zeno because only results matter—intentions aren’t enough. His insistence on keeping his mistress employed in the office leads to friction with Ada, his wife. Since Zeno always talks about business in terms of gambling, and the stock market as doubly so, they bring out the worst in Guido’s character. His family encourages his participation in the stock market, where it’s clear his ruin is guaranteed. As his friend and semi-business partner, Zeno intends to protect or correct Guido but, as usual with Zeno, his intentions don’t go very far. To be fair, his resolve does carry farther with Guido than with almost any other project. Fate plays a major part in Guido’s demise since the confluence of Guido’s fake suicide attempt (taken lightly by his wife after a previous “attempt”) and a major storm undermine help from the doctor.

Because of the length of the chapter, there are many topics I could go over but I wanted to focus on what I saw as the dark turn. There are several allusions to life as a sickness in earlier chapters, but Svevo expresses it directly in this one: “Natural law does not entitle us to happiness, but rather it prescribes wretchedness and sorrow.” What’s humorous about such an outlook in this context is the resistance Zeno shows to psychoanalysis, yet such a sentiment follows a history through Schopenhauer to Freud. Zeno believes health exists only relative to others’ sicknesses. Taking aim at analysis again, Zeno determines “My sickness was a ruling passion, a dream, and also a fear. It must have originated from a process of reasoning, by the term perversion we mean a deviation from health, that kind of health that accompanied us for a stretch of our life.”

If life is a sickness, and dwelling on it makes things worse, death can be the only cure. Zeno’s comments when looking at Guido’s and Ada’s newborn twins doesn’t prove uplifting at what is in store for them: “To me they looked like two blanched little corpses.”(This comment also echoes an earlier conversation Zeno had with Ada regarding how to spare children from suffering by making them love parents less, and Ada responds by saying in that case “the surest method would be to kill them.”) Religion can be useful but Zeno parodies the benefits. He constantly talks about his innocence, often when having just committed terrible acts. He feels innocent when he doesn’t spend the entire night at his mistress’ house as he planned or when he returns home from her bed earlier than normal. He constantly feels the need to confess, both to his wife and his mistress. In this chapter he confesses twice to his wife and each time he immediately falls asleep and has a great night’s sleep. (There may be a joke there equating the benefits of confession and sex.)

In missing Guido’s funeral, Zeno declares he “couldn’t linger over those religious practices.” Life’s activities are more important to him than going through the motions of religion. After all, if life is a sickness only death can purify. But then Zeno’s self-history has to be taken with more than a grain of salt. His misinterpretations and misunderstandings undermine much of what he says. He creates his innocence out of thin air, substituting good intentions for expiation. I’m looking forward to seeing where this leads us in Zeno’s last chapter.

Zeno’s Conscience: Wife and Mistress

Lunch was sad. Augusta sought no explanation for my tardiness, and I offered her none. I was afraid of giving myself away, especially because, during the brief walk between the Public Garden and home, I had toyed with the idea of telling her everything, and the story of my infidelity might therefore be written on my honest face. That would have been the only way of saving myself. Telling her everything, I would have placed myself under her protection and under her surveillance. It would have been such a decisive act that then, in good faith, I could have marked that day’s date as a start toward honesty and health.

…

I cherished the picture of myself as the good husband, who never becomes less good for being adulterous.

This chapter for this post picks up shortly after Zeno’s wedding and traces how he gained and lost a mistress. All quotes from the book use the translation by William Weaver. It's been a strange, tough couple of weeks so I'll try and get back in the swing of posting.

“Who could have foreseen this, when I was limping from Ada to Alberta, to arrive at Augusta? I discovered I had not been a blind fool manipulated by others, but a very clever man.” I'll go with the blind fool, actually. Zeno continues to piece together his life, writing in order to help himself and his psychoanalyst. Yet when Zeno analyzes things he tends to distort their meaning. Many times he travels part of the way to understanding, only to veer off into some comic contradiction. His fear of aging and of dying haunts him, feeding a premature jealousy of his widow’s remarriage. Suffering invigorates Zeno and his wife’s comfort provides more pleasure, even when the suffering comes from his infidelity. His wife is only partially right when she calls her husband “an imaginary sick man”. Zeno is sick, even if it is only in his imagination. Carrying out resolutions also makes Zeno physically ill.

Lack of resolve
“I already knew I was a plaything in the hands of the intemperate forces of nature. Nature, who found little difficulty in accumulating those forces, found even less in unleashing them.”

Zeno’s lack of resolve causes him to blame nature or others for his weak will. He blames his wife for giving him a pretext to take a mistress. He resolves to stay away from Carla, his mistress, but always returns to her. When Zeno goes to visit Carla, it's in order to live “more intensely”. Once with her, though, the same desire “would have led me at once back to Augusta, who was the only one with whom I could have talked about my love for her [Carla].” It's as if he recognizes how much he truly loves his wife when with Carla.

Even with his lack of resolve Zeno occasionally has insights into his lack of freedom (but not very often). For someone examining his life for analysis he shows a remarkable hit-or-miss ability to understand himself. Zeno wants his self-analysis, which he believes to be from a position of insight, to absolve him of guilt and sickness but the reader knows nothing will change. Zeno constantly makes matters worse by playing with fire. It isn’t just his smoking that he talks about in this quote: “It was a brief moment, full of the best intentions. I even remembered some strange advice once given me to rid myself of the habit of smoking, and it might work also on this occasion: sometimes, to be satisfied, it was enough to light the match, then throw away both match and cigarette.” Zeno always lights the match but throws away nothing.

Zeno admits that perhaps "I love the weaker sex in direct proportion to its weakness.” This might explain why he loves himself so much.

Religious tone
“I felt very innocent because, to begin with, I hadn’t betrayed her by staying away from our conjugal domicile for a whole night [he was with his mistress only part of the evening]. This innocence was so beautiful that I was tempted to enhance it. I began by uttering some words resembling a confession.”

Religion, or at least religious language, receives a lot of emphasis in this section. I’ve mentioned this aspect earlier but it really comes into its own in this chapter. Words such as innocent, innocence, pure, saved, confess, confession, faith, and indulgence appear often. I will have to confess that I am not sure where Svevo is going with this. Is he comparing religion to psychoanalysis? Is he making a commentary on the inadequacy of psychoanalysis? Of religion? Analysis proves inadequate for his problems to this point—he thinks he is analyzing himself while at the same time demeaning the doctor that suggested recording his history. I want to see where the religious language goes…it’s an interesting angle that Svevo is adding.

Zeno feels pure or innocent when leaving his mistress early to return to his wife. He absolves himself of his sins immediately, which is fitting for someone that experiences guilt before he commits a (planned) sin. Most of the time, though, he pins the blame of his sins on others. For example, his mistress Carla was supposed to offer resistance since that was her “mission as a woman.”


And with that, I’ll end the post with Zeno’s laws of motion as I see them:
1) Zeno tends to bumble along in the same state of motion until acted upon by an outside force (at which point Zeno will panic). Zeno’s intentions have no impact on his motion.
2) The relationship between Zeno’s enjoyment of an action can be stated as Enjoyment = Action x “Last”. If Zeno intends his action as the last time he will perform it, the variable “Last” is greater than 1, magnifying his enjoyment. If Zeno doesn't intend his action to be for the last time, the variable “Last” approaches zero.
3) For each of Zeno’s actions there are multiple reactions, all unequal, disproportionate, and nonlinear.

Zeno’s Conscience: The Story of My Marriage

Those who have not yet experienced marriage believe it is more important than it is. The chosen companion will renew, improving or worsening, our breed by bearing children: Mother Nature wants this but cannot direct us openly, because at that time of life we haven’t the slightest thought of children, so she induces us to believe that our wife will also bring about a renewal of ourselves: a curious illusion not confirmed by any text.

(All quotes from the book use the translation by William Weaver.)

I’ve been home for a few days but have had a bothersome head cold that has erased all desire to read, write or think. Hopefully it will clear up soon. This chapter focuses on Zeno’s life shortly after his father dies in which he attempts to play the roles of businessman and suitor. During Zeno’s business and social dealings he meets Giovanni Malfenti. Giovanni takes the younger man under his wing, becoming like a second father to Zeno. Eventually Giovanni invites Zeno to his home to meet his daughters (Ada, Augusta, Alberta, and Anna) and, while never stated but understood, possibly marry one of them.

Eight year-old Anna is too young for marriage but the other three are described as Zeno meets them. He tells himself he will be a stern judge of the girls, yet he acknowledges he has no idea what qualities he desires. He meets Augusta first: “How could anyone have called her beautiful? The first thing you noticed about her was a squint so pronounced that if someone tried to recall her after not having seen her for a while, that defect would personify her totally.” Fortunately Ada and Alberta are lovely and Zeno chooses Ada for pursuit.

Zeno bumbles along, undermining his suit in almost everything he does. As an unreliable narrator Zeno proves to be both maddeningly clueless and prescient. He realizes he has turned his courtship into a “stupid adventure, which actually shames me” but he does not stop his actions, continuing with the shameful aspects and the courtship in general. Not completely bound by social convention because of her age, Anna tells Zeno he is crazy every time he leaves their house. It is easy to be swept up in the story but every once in a while Zeno brings the reader back to the reason this book exists—at the orders of his psychoanalyst he writes about his life in order to help understand his problems. Like everything else in his life the reader quickly realizes Zeno has no control of his life even though he thinks he does.

Many times Zeno walks up to the edge of the awareness that he is not in control nor does he perceive reality accurately but he always veers away from those realizations. As I said, he can be cannily accurate of himself at times and he provides one of his best evaluations: “For all my efforts I achieved the result of that marksman who hit the bullseye, but of the target next to his.” It is painful to watch his courtship because it is clear to everyone else that Ada wants nothing to do with him. Again and again, his contradictions undermine his efforts: “So I set out to win Ada and I continued my efforts to make her laugh at me, at my expense, forgetting that I had chosen her because of her seriousness.” I will skip the fateful day of his marriage proposal(s) because the whole section has to be read to be fully appreciated but I will say watching him propose to all three eligible sister within a few minutes was as funny as it was painful.

The beauty of Italo Svevo’s creation exists in this comic pain. Zeno’s contradictions depict the incongruity between what he says and what he experiences. He believes “it’s surely easier to change oneself than to reshape others” yet he never achieves any of his set goals, whether it’s sticking with one course of study or stopping smoking. He believes in his potential to improve himself and even delays asking Ada to marry him “because of some doubts about myself. I was waiting to become nobler, stronger, worthier of my divine maiden.” He proposes, not because he became any of those things but because a worthier suitor appeared on the scene.

I want to note two topics in this section. The first subject centers on Zeno’s focus on death: “[B]ut to her it seemed wrong to live only in preparation for death. I held my ground and asserted that death was the true organizer of life. I thought always of death, and therefore I had only one sorrow: the certainty of having to die.” As always, the reader has to wonder if Zeno is telling the truth but the contradiction rings true for the character—death may be the “true organizer of life” and Zeno may think about it constantly but he resists any benefit because of his sorrow. He believes “What’s definitive is always calm, because it is detached from time” but time’s progress constantly haunts him, denying him the calm he seeks. His one moment of contentment occurs when his marriage proposal is accepted: “I no longer had to resolve anything, because everything had been resolved. This was true clarity.” We will see if how long that contentment lasts.

The second subject falls under Zeno’s inability to see things as they really are. It turns out Zeno suffers from another disease than just life: “I, who, when I opened my mouth, got things wrong or misled people because otherwise speaking would have seemed to me pointless. Without being an orator, I suffered from the disease of words. Words for me had to be an event in themselves and therefore could not be imprisoned in any other event.” His trouble starts with seeing reality, then move on to expressing it: “I act like a friend of mine, a very refined painter who, when he portrays beautiful women, thinks intensely also of some other beautiful thing, for example of a piece of lovely porcelain. A dangerous dream, because it can endow the dreamed-of women with new power and, when seen again in the light of reality, they retain something of the fruits and flowers and porcelain with which they were clad.” When he pursues Ada he doesn’t see her as she really is, instead imagining an Ada that doesn't really exist, “whose cheeks I had assiduously polished, whose hands and feet I had made smaller, whose figure I had thinned and refined.”

Svevo sets up a lovely comparison of his creation to real life. Potential father-in-law Giovanni describes seeing a woman injured as she disembarked from a tram: “With some exaggeration, Giovanni described his anxiety on seeing the woman preparing to make that leap, and in such a way that she was obviously going to fall and perhaps be crushed. It was quite sad to foresee it all and to have no time to rescue her.” The reader sees Zeno setting himself up for a fall time after time, but anxiety is replaced with mirth because of Svevo’s touch. We couldn’t rescue Zeno if we wanted to but the point is we don’t want to rescue him—we want to see what will become of him in his fall.

Zeno’s Conscience: My Father’s Death

Afterwards, at the funeral, I managed to remember my father weak and good as I had always known him from my infancy, and I convinced myself that the slap given me by a dying man hadn’t been intentional. I became good as gold, and my father’s memory accompanied me, growing sweeter all the time. It was like a delightful dream: now we were in perfect harmony, I had become the weaker and he the stronger.

I returned to the religion of my childhood and remained there for a long time. I imagined that my father heard me and I could tell him that the fault had been not mine but the doctor’s. The lie was of no importance because now he understood everything, and so did I. And for quite some time the conversation with my father went on, tender and secret like an illicit love, because with everyone I continued to laugh at all religious practices, while it is true—and I wish to confess it here—that into someone’s hands I daily and fervently commended my father’s spirit. True religion, indeed, is that which does not have to be avowed in order to provide the solace that at times—if only rarely—you cannot do without.

(All quotes from the book use the translation by William Weaver.)

It will be interesting to see what else qualifies as a “true religion” for Zeno over the course of the book. Besides cigarettes, that is. Zeno makes fun of the psychoanalysis but he continues to write about his life as instructed by his analyst. This section focuses mostly on the complex relationship he had with his father, but he questions how much to tell: “If I describe my father in over-scrupulous detail, it might turn out that, to achieve my own cure, it would have been necessary to analyze him first.”

In this section, one theme overlaying the father-son relationship centers on Zeno’s unrealized potential. He swears it is there…if only he could unlock it, such as at the time his mother dies: “My mother died before I was fifteen. I wrote some poems dedicated to her—hardly the same as weeping—and, in my sorrow, I was accompanied always by the feeling that at this moment a serious, industrious life was to begin for me. My grief itself hinted at a more intense life.” Part of Zeno’s anger at his father lingering at death’s doorstep lies in the fact he can’t “continue my efforts at self-improvement” until his father dies. Like the last cigarette that isn’t, there lies alleged potential to be exploited that is never realized. Most of the time Zeno believes his intent in improving should be enough to get credit for results.

Religion plays a key role for Zeno after both parents’ deaths. Similar to the feeling after the passing of his father (in the opening quote), he turns to religion to soften the blow (as well as realizing his potential): “At that time a still-active religious feeling attenuated and softened the terrible misfortune. My mother continued to live, though far from me, and she would derive satisfaction from the successes for which I was preparing myself.” The “religious feeling” deserts him at some point to resurface after the death of his father, although that resurfacing is suspect since earlier he wrote at his father’s death he no longer believed Heaven existed and he was finished with religion at age thirty. In recounting the evening before his father’s cerebral hemorrhage, Zeno describes his father’s “sudden religious inspiration” as the first symptom of his death. Not only is life a sickness, so is religion.

On almost every topic Zeno tends to contradict prior statements or paints two different pictures of how he feels. Even with such tendencies, he’s not exactly an unreliable narrator. Sometimes he hits the mark without intending to, or he uncovers one facet while exploring something else, such as this section where he evaluates his father’s attempt to pass on his knowledge: Zeno is happy that his father wants to pass on “the knowledge he thought he possessed, though I was convinced I could learn nothing from him.” Exactly—Zeno will learn nothing from him. And, as the opening quote details, his memory and recall tend to change over time.

On to the next section about his marriage…

Zeno’s Conscience: Smoke

Cover of the second edition of La coscienza di Zeno (1925)
Picture source

I had never heard of Zeno’s Conscience until recently (shows how much I get around) and was happy to see a copy of it at the library. The life of the author, Italo Svevo, proves to be an interesting tale by itself.
All quotes from the book use the translation by William Weaver.

Zeno’s Conscience begins with a preface by Zeno’s analyst saying he regrets suggesting his patient write an autobiography. Even though this idea “achieved results far beyond my hopes”, the doctor publishes these notes as revenge for the unflattering portrayal and since Zeno suspended treatments. He declares what follows are “the many truths and the many lies” of Zeno.

Zeno’s preamble follows and we get a taste for what the rest of the book will be like. For example, he mourns that he cannot warn his sister-in-law’s baby that he needs to memorize his life for his own benefit years later. And “I bought and read a treatise on psychoanalysis, just to make his task easier. It’s not hard to understand, but it’s very boring.” And then we plunge into the mind of Zeno...

Zeno’s insistence that he wants to stop smoking and his many last cigarettes provides the running gag throughout the first chapter “Smoke.” Knowing that a cigarette will be his last causes him to enjoy it all the more, and smoking it at some significant date and time (numerically or anniversary-wise) should insure he upholds his vow. [True story—I had a co-worker that woke up in the middle of the night while having a heart attack. He went into the kitchen, sat at the table and smoked a cigarette before he woke up his wife to take him to the hospital. He said he knew it would be his last cigarette whether he lived or died, and it was hard not to laugh when he said it was the best damn cigarette he ever had.]

“I believe the taste of a cigarette is more intense when it’s your last. The others, too, have a special taste of their own, but less intense. The last one gains flavor from the feeling of victory over oneself and the hope of an imminent future of strength and health. The other have their importance because, in lighting them, you are proclaiming your freedom, while the future of strength and health remains, only moving off a bit.”

The chapter is full of comic contradictions, Zeno providing deep insight into his actions in one breath while displaying his complete lack of understanding in the next. What follows are brief notes on a few of the topics raised—as usual, I’m not reading ahead of what I’m writing so some of these subjects may not be important in the grand scheme of the book.

Life as a disease:

Now that I am here, analyzing myself, I am seized by a suspicion: Did I perhaps love cigarettes so much because they enabled me to blame them for my clumsiness? Who knows? If I had stopped smoking, would I have become the strong, ideal man I expected to be? Perhaps it was this suspicion that bound me to my habit, for it is comfortable to live in the belief that you are great, though your greatness is latent.” … “Like that old doctor described by Goldoni, can I expect to die healthy, having lived with illness all my life?

Life seems to be a burden to Zeno. He reinforces this when he says “Disease is a conviction, and I was born with that conviction.” If life is a disease, what has he done for treatments? And does that correlate with how he has lived his life? At age 20 a doctor treats Zeno for a lack of stomach acid. After prescribing a certain acid, Zeno suffers from excess acidity. If Zeno can believed, that is…and that’s a big if. Even so, he thinks he suffers from a cure that was worse than the disease, which parallels nicely with his statement that death is the “cure” for life. In discussion with the nurse Giovanna, he declares that only the living suffer—the dead understand everything but don’t care.

Self-sabotage and contradictions: Also in the above quote is the idea that Zeno hinders himself, which shows up several times in the chapter. He couldn’t make up his mind between studying chemistry or law “because both these disciplines involve work that begins at a set time, whereas I never know at what hour I may get up.” Family members must see this trait, too, as his assistant had been “imposed on me to keep me from squandering my father’s legacy.” While believing that the assistant Olivi prevents him from doing real work, Zeno panics when Olivi becomes ill and he might have to do the work after all. A friend once commented that he believed Zeno had two personalities—one who commanded and one who was a slave. The slave, however, craved freedom and would flout the master-self whenever he could.

Confessions: Revelation should be expected in an attempted autobiography but this section contains a lot of confessions. Zeno confesses to his doctors about his smoking and his unhappiness about women (he’s unable to possess them all). He confesses to his assistant when he loses their bet on stopping smoking. The nurse Giovanna confesses about the affair she had when her husband was alive. These didn’t strike me as having religious overtones, but then this passage upset that approach:

It’s true, moreover, that having then succeeded with great effort in dispelling all decisiveness from my spirit, I succeeded in not smoking for several hours, but when my mouth was cleansed and I felt an innocent taste such as a newborn infant must know, and a desire for a cigarette came over me, and when I smoked it I felt a remorse for which I renewed the decision I had tried to abolish.

How else to read this than to take into account the religious overtones? Definitely a topic to keep an eye on as I read more.