The Worry-Fencer: the roots and restlessness of our present time.

Ariosto: Where have you been?

Tasso: Walking through Rome.

Ariosto: Are you certain?

Tasso: What do you mean? As sure as I exist!

Ariosto: But are you yourself? You appear to be distracted, scattered.

Tasso: I have been as busy as Dario Fo.

Ariosto: Maybe so. But you can be busy and distracted, or busy to be distracted.

Tasso: But I have been making great progress in my work. This morning I wrote the first half on an article. Only then did I take time for a walk.

Ariosto: What is this article?

Tasso: I’ve been studying the composition of the garden frescos in the Villa of Livia, the wife of Augustus. With new chemical analysis, we’re close to determining the type of paint and even the season when they were painted.

Ariosto: Interesting.

Tasso: Is that all you have to say?

Ariosto: How is this progress?

Tasso: Why this is a great achievement: we can date these frescos with greater accuracy and precision.

Ariosto: That’s one type of progress, one that can justify scientific research. But I’m thinking about another. I mean, have you, or has any of us, made progress beyond the time of Rome?

Tasso: How could you ask such a question? Of course we have! Think of how much more we know, and how far we have come since the classical age!

Ariosto: I ask because I see you so distracted, and not yourself. I’m wondering this: is your thinking more centered, more still, than that of Seneca or Marcus Aurelius?

More inspired than that of Lucretius or Ovid? More playful than the mind of Plautus? On the contrary – you appear to be weighted with more worry than Faust in his old age: and he is the epitome of our modernity in his restlessness!

Tasso: You may have a point. There are many things that trouble me.

Ariosto: Such as?

Tasso: As you said, the value of my work. What have I really accomplished? What is its lasting value?

Ariosto: These are good questions. What are your answers?

Tasso: I think I believe in progress for progress’s sake. Like many other people, I like the sound of the word “progress.” It brings me comfort, in the sense that I – we – are always advancing. But advancing towards what? And is this real? Or just an empty notion, a value without value? What does it mean to progress?

Ariosto: More good questions! I like to remember that the Renaissance created great innovations in art, science, medicine, and literature by recovering the past, by looking backward, so to speak, and gathering energy and excitement from these discoveries. The past to the Renaissance world was a lost continent, whose exploration made their own future seem brighter.

Tasso: I wish I had their sense of purpose and meaning.

Ariosto: Why can’t you recover it again? They say that when the ancient Greek statue of Lacoön was unearthed in 1506, it transformed the art of Michelangelo. Let Michelangelo show you the way: that the past does not so much lie behind us as before us, waiting to inform and inspire us.

Tasso: Such paradoxical progress! That the progress I have long believed in and considered the ultimate prize has only deluded me, and had me snapping at reflections, like Aesop’s dog in the fable. What you have me thinking is that our future lies in the past, and our past in our future.

Ariosto: Well-put. I would say it this way: we are rooted in a history, which brings us both life and age. We can deny these roots, but they are there, even though hard to feel in our restlessness. “The intelligence of the universe is social,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. Everything has its place and relation, and history is all around us, even in the words we are now speaking.