How Many Doors Poem by gershon hepner

How many doors are there which someone’s touch
may open, helping those who are enclosed
within themselves to say alive? So much
depends on those behind the doors we’ve closed
to lock ourselves out from the play
in which we’re actors. We cannot direct
our own parts while we in seclusion stay
behind closed doors. When doors are opened by
a person who observes the one we’ve closed,
we should walk out before we petrify,
andbe prepared to be metamorphosed.

Rachel Donadio writes about the 50th anniversary of Giseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’a “The Leopard (“’The Leopard’ Turns 50, ” NYt Book Review, July 13,2008) :
Sicily is the key to Italy, as Goethe once wrote, and one novel is the key to Sicily: “The Leopard, ” Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s masterpiece. This tale of the decline and fall of the house of Salina, a family of Sicilian aristocrats, first appeared in 1958, but it reads more like the last 19th-century novel, a perfect evocation of a lost world.
To mark its 50th anniversary this year, the novel’s American publisher, Pantheon, has issued a new edition with some previously unpublished material. It includes a new foreword by Lampedusa’s adopted son, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, drawing on newly discovered correspondence from Lampedusa, a gentleman scholar who died at 60 the year before the novel — his first and last — appeared. Initially rejected by several leading publishers, “The Leopard” went on to become one of the best-selling Italian novels of the 20th century (more than 3.2 million copies sold) and the basis for Luchino Visconti’s classic 1963 film. “Reading and rereading it, ” wrote E. M. Forster, an early admirer, “has made me realize how many ways there are of being alive, how many doors there are, close to one, which someone else’s touch may open.”
The novel tells the story of Don Fabrizio, the world-weary, cleareyed Prince of Salina, scion of an old feudal family and lover of astronomy. It opens in 1860 with the landing in Sicily of forces intent on unifying Italy and ends in 1910, when a priest comes to assess the reliquaries of the prince’s now aged spinster daughters. In between, it recounts the fortunes of the prince’s favorite nephew, Tancredi, who supports the unification efforts of Giuseppe Garibaldi more out of opportunism than idealism and eventually becomes a diplomat. Tancredi’s career is made possible only by his marrying money — which inevitably means marrying down. To the horror of his aunt, the devastation of a cousin who loves him and the wry comprehension of his uncle, Tancredi falls in love with Angelica, the beautiful daughter of an upwardly mobile landed peasant father and an illiterate mother not fit for polite company. It is Tancredi who speaks the novel’s most famous line: “If we want things to stay as they are, ” he tells his uncle, “things will have to change.”


7/13/08