Primo incontro (in English)
In September, I wrote this short reflection on what a first encounter might mean. I sent it to Telmo Pievani, a philosopher of science whom I'll be speaking with on The Blue Hour in the new year.
I explored another kind of beginning in an earlier piece titled Inception.
By FARHA GUERRERO
I’m interested in the first encounter. The first meeting with another mind, a new consciousness.
I would suggest that a first encounter of this kind is not ordinary, trivial, or predictable, even if it begins by chance. It is a moment when, for the first time, two pairs of human eyes may meet. For the first time, one hears a new voice. And sometimes, one may immediately feel a sublime sense of another.
This kind of first encounter predates the second. Because the possibility of more encounters always exists.
I want to dwell, briefly, if possible, within this first encounter, and try to understand precisely what this encounter might mean philosophically and what may happen following it.
I remember quite vividly one such encounter with a writer I had never read or ‘met’ before.
Some years ago, I loaded a small iPod with an audiobook of immense length. Wearing wired headphones, I began ascending the steep mountain forest trail close to home with my dog. It was in this ascent that I began listening to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s extraordinary masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, through the voice of a narrator in English.
I remember this moment with such lucidity that, while I hiked, I was transposed almost instantaneously to 19th-century Saint Petersburg, Russia, while still afoot in Whistler, British Columbia.
And just as I was ascending a trail, the protagonist of this novel, Raskolnikov, was descending an apartment staircase, trying to avert his eyes from the sickly feeling of encountering his landlady, whom he despised.
This descent, before Raskolnikov retreated into the streets of Saint Petersburg, had such an enormous effect on me that I began to replay his descent multiple times, almost subconsciously, hitting the playback button repeatedly on the small device in my hands. All the while, I kept ascending.
Who was this author, I thought to myself? What is this beautiful narrative unfolding on its invisible pages as I walk through a forest?
That primo incontro, the first meeting with Dostoevsky and his main character across time and space, would be the beginning of something that I could never have predicted.
Not only would this great writer of fiction soon evolve into an exceptional literary figure in my life, he would also become someone who would bring me deep into the psychology of life itself.
Through the worlds he created and imagined in his many books and short stories, I would pursue still more Russian writers: people like Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gogol.
And although I was not reading in a traditional sense that sunny afternoon, and certainly not listening to the novel in Dostoevsky’s native Russian, that initial acquaintance and meeting, or primo incontro, would become pivotal in my life.
That first meeting would change the way I saw literature. The way I understood what was possible in fiction.
It would alter my life as a writer.
Nor would I have known that almost a decade later, I would be afflicted with the same illness, epilepsy, from which Dostoevsky suffered for much of his adult life — an illness that reminds me that I am, always, in good company.
The question then becomes: what is the value, if there is a value, of the primo incontro? And why does slowing down to reflect on a moment that might have been only a few minutes be of any importance?
Why, too, would we find these moments deeply lodged in our memories even years later?
And can a first encounter have meaning and value even if we do not actually meet the person in our lifetime?
In recent weeks, just over two to be exact, I discovered, also by chance, another thinker who unexpectedly walked into my life in the most profound way.
I was sitting nestled on a blue couch late at night next to my partner when I played this man’s voice on my laptop for the first time.
Telmo Pievani was delivering a lecture in Italian titled Imparo, dunque evolvo, and within a few minutes, I was drawn into his words and worlds, almost like the young girl I once was, who would regularly seat herself in the front row of any public lecture.
I had neither known his name, nor read about him, nor encountered him through another. So, in essence, my meeting with him that night was the beginning of another primo incontro.
From the perspective of an evolutionary biologist, two weeks is scarcely time at all.
And yet, that first voice I heard in the stillness of a summer evening grew familiar with each passing hour. Pievani entered my living room that night as a perfect stranger; he has since evolved into a household name.
I have found myself continually residing within his words.
What will become of this primo incontro, I ask myself?
Will Pievani find a permanent home within my own consciousness, like Dostoevsky, whom I hold in such esteem?
Will his books soon join my downstairs home library of at least 1,000 works?
And too, will he eventually be among those carefully selected to make their way upwards to the other library that lives beside my bed — a small bookshelf of the authors I hold most dear, who sleep beside me every night?