Page 290 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

290 from Italy to the Canary Islands

History and literature of travelling

aradise. Fortunate Isles, always in an elsewhere that is above all
purity, unbelievable enchantment, a fresco where everything turns
to silence and the body vanishes; all must become thought, nay,
rarefaction of it, moment that preannounces the divine.
To reach that beyond we seek so that even stillness may reveal itself to
itself as such, little is needed: a passage from the Bible, an ancient verse,
a few words elevated to become support for every possible ideal concep-
tion of salvation. Moreover, next to these splinters of sublimeness from
which poets will find nourishment, there is evidence, even florilegia made
of words: geographical evidence, the only possibility to latch on to terra
firma, to the certainties from which dreams can take off, Poetry, we could
almost say the unreachable at your fingertips. It is as if only from the
news, the fact, could the words that contain the secret to save oneself find
peaceful accommodation on the page. More words, and the places of our
calmed fears are given shape.
But where was it possible to find Paradise? In the East, at least giving faith
to the most ancient opinion. Thus Paradise as a place already geographically
ascertainable and not only as metaphysics, an actual landing beyond life.
When Dante in the De Monarchia speaks of the Fortunate Isles, he
states what he learnt from Virgil – the Poet’s guiding light – and from Oro-
sius, a disciple of Augustine, with his work Historia adversus Paganos. So
writes the Poet, “Europe then made him noble because of his very ancient
ancestor, that is Dardanus; and also Africa for his most ancient ancestress
Elektra, daughter of Atlas, king of great renown ... That Atlas was Africa is
evidenced by a mountain in those parts that bears his name and that Oro-
sius in his description of the world says is in Africa with these words, <Its
farthest border is mount Atlas with the Isles they call Fortunate>; for it was
of Africa that he spoke…”
Belief in an Earthly Paradise and continuous oscillation between East
and West. Even Dante in the beginning placed it in the East. But this dis-
pute - of which the public remains unaware - only reinforces the idea that
is in men, as always, to establish in one’s mind, we say it once again, most
of the time leaning on the sublimeness of discoveries by sea, a place where
Stillness really makes sense, a word that contains practically everything in