Stored value
A culture that has worked out how change works puts meaning into things that don't change (as much) because doing that has power.
I had every intention of sending Friday. But the universe had other ideas. I won’t make a long story short. Suffice it to say that a few things wrong. As I write this I’m reminded of Luigi Pirandello’s1 “nothing is more complicated than sincerity.”
He’d say that as the chief preoccupation throughout his work was the problem of identity. In his play Cosí é (se vi pare) (Right You Are (If You Think You Are)), two people hold contradictory notions about the identity of a third person.
The protagonist in Vestire gli ignudi (To Clothe the Naked) tries to establish her individuality by assuming various identities, which are successively stripped from her; she gradually realizes her true position in the social order and in the end dies «naked», without a social mask, in both her own and her friends’ eyes.
In Enrico IV (Henry IV) a man supposedly mad imagines that he is a medieval emperor, and his imagination and reality are strangely confused. Lots to ponder on this one.
The conflict between illusion and reality is central in La vita che ti diedi (The Life I Gave You) in which Anna’s long-lost son returns home and contradicts her mental conception of him. However, his death resolves Anna’s conflict; she clings to illusion rather than to reality.
The analysis and dissolution of a unified self are carried to an extreme in Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of An Author) where the stage itself, the symbol of appearance versus reality, becomes the setting of the play.
Pirandello’s attitudes in an early essay, L’Umorismo (Humour), are fundamental to all his plays. His characters attempt to fulfill their self-seeking roles and are defeated by life itself which, always changing, enables them to see their perversity.
His humor is irony about life’s contradictions.
Belief often wins the struggle over reality.
The people who built cathedrals, they had their work cut out for them. Those who envisioned, design, and found the funds to build them, they do know a thing or two about belief as they often didn’t live long enough to see the work completed.
Check out the Duomo in Siena, built over 600 years.
This is a four-point conversation about stored value in things that don’t change.
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1/5
Since the last round-up, On Value in Culture published:
On Doing Value-Aligned Work—Which necessitates that we align with the incentive landscape.
(🔒) If Airports Were More Like Libraries—Rather than gated commercial centers. Could we not make these ‘in between’ spaces into cultural hubs?
Common Biases Trick us Into Foolish Trade-offs—Yet, the way we can access and upgrade our human ‘source code’ is primarily cognitive.
(🔒) Carnival is Not Over—Because the need to drink, dance, celebrate, subvert is a primary force of humanity.
What it means ‘to think’—Ideas that provoke thought sit outside the contours of noisy and crowded topics, often where many disciplines converge.
(🔒) A Break from the Past—How ‘a complete unknown’ shifted cultural vibes.
With many thanks to the few who’ve been recommending this work of patience and love. Supporters can access full articles and commentary at The Vault (🔒).
2/5
So we can add value by adding meaning, as in the example of a Cathedral built over centuries by different generations of people. But what about everyday objects? Could we add value to them?
Could objects straight from the factory seem orphaned, smaller and less interesting for their pristine condition? Families used to recycle stuff more aggressively in the past. Cost was a consideration. But also the bond to confer an object meaning.
When my sister died, I insisted on keeping a few items of clothing that belonged to her—they’re special because they were hers. And for that reason they’re dear to me.
What if objects were better at absorbing and recording and reporting their histories? Could there be additional value in use if we built character back into things? This idea has three potential challenges.
Technical—how do we make the object capable of recording and then retelling its story? Imagine if Atelier Riforma, which does the work to reimagine apparel could include some form of recording with it.
Cultural—how do we choose and craft the best stories, the narrative that creates the most value? Where an item is more than what it is, it’s also where it’s been and with whom. Culture is the accumulation of energy, longevity in the item is its stored value.
Economic—how do we think about what kind of value this is, and how can we measure, distribute, capture and store it in the marketplace? Why learn about usefulness.
Meaning and care add value. However, if you really want to capitalize the full ‘best use of a thing,’ it looks more like the lost conversation on value than the current understanding of value.
3/5
Material things are not the only stuff families (may) share. Wisdom is something previous generations valued. Not just beliefs and ideas, but also in the form of practical things. Recipes for example.
I won’t talk about natural remedies using herbs and oils, though they’ve been part of my family for generations. And they work for us. Maybe there’s belief or an expectation we fulfill with them. But I don’t underestimate its power.
How about food recipes? I mean, super-multiple-Michelin-starred chef Massimo Bottura bases many of his signature dishes on recipes from his nonna. He learned to make tortellini and passatelli2 from Nonna Ancella.
“I am an Italian chef born in Modena. I grew up under the table where my grandmother Ancella rolled out the dough. My dream began there.”
I use the ragù alla bolognese recipe my Nonna Giuliana used to make, sans her homemade tagliatelle, alas. I never learned, though I watched her make the mix and roll it out thewith the rolling pin on her large wood board. Her skill was impressive.
The result was a thick, rough pasta, cut by hand I should add, that absorbed the ragù. I wish I had a camera and thought of taking photos of the results back then. Those are the images I’d treasure now.
Instead, I have this out-of-focus photo from a fantastic Osteria in Bologna that keeps only 11 tables and wants reservations (months ahead). We saw a few walk-ins being turned away. Scarcity can be a recipe for success when it means quality and care.
4/5
Recipes still do have a material component, which is what gives them meaning beyond the intrinsic connection with whomever put them together or used them. What about language? Is that more immaterial?
Words have meaning.
The inscription on Trajan’s Column dates back to 113 A.D. The person who engraved these letters, the Senate and the People of Rome who dedicated them, and Trajan himself are long since dust.
But the words remain.
This particular set of characters happens to be the basis of modern typography—an unintended consequence, but true. Typesetters have long considered Trajan’s column to be the gold standard of Roman capital letters.
Every printed word in a Western language owes a little something to this bit of Second Century political adulation. Which goes to show the persistence and power of words—or, in this case, the mere form of words.
This inscription was meant to immortalize a certain Marcus Ulpius Nerva Traianus for his victory in the otherwise-forgotten Dacian Wars.
Instead, it really came to immortalize an idea—one of classical beauty, of the delicate serifs and contrasting strokes which still support the alphabet you are now reading. It’s a legacy far greater than quelling some upstart empire on the banks of the Danube.
In our twitterized world, it’s easy to forget the value of words. ‘Less is more,’ as communication gets stripped to its barest essentials. Syntax, elegance, and grammar—all gone, in the service of utilitarian economy.
As with material objects, we get what we need, consume it, and throw it away. We’re okay with the fact that what we put out there is consumed quickly and thrown away, even culture and information.
Even before the Internet, we started using tools that made our communication shorter and faster. Now we’re at an interesting point where we tweet. We’ll get to a point where we’ve reached terminal velocity, maybe grunts.
But just because we’re no longer chipping our thoughts into stone, we shouldn’t assume their lack of permanence or effect.
Our most trivial online musings rarely escape the unblinking, restless gaze of Google and its seemingly limitless virtual libraries of digital storage. It would be fascinating to peer 19 centuries into the future, squinting like some bygone artisan under a hot Roman sun, to see what of our words remain for others. And now because AI…
We string words along in sentences and talks. Talks are an artform. We know composition in writing has tremendous force. But also the careful use of words in teaching. Linguist Luca Serianni is a very popular3 teacher because his Italian is stellar, extremely elegant and layered, full of lights and nuances.
“There was, in the way in which the students who had already begun to follow his course referred to him, a sort of adoration, as if this professor of history of the Italian language had shamanic gifts capable of initiating his students into some secret cult of the word.”
In oral communication it’s almost unheard of. In fact, many writers are now using how we talk—brief, fragmented, punchy statements—in essays. It’s such a pleasure to listen to Serianni explain (this concept has a fantastic word in Italian, spiegare, like unfolding of meaning) that his students are enchanted.
Language has a strong effect on others. From the orators of ancient Rome to the more modern sermon givers, presenters, and speech writers, we have long prized the skill of selecting the right words,4 and timing them well to persuade us to do something.
Certain words are better than others to get people to give— a study of 45,000 projects demonstrates which words work. Serianni’s musicality in the use of phonetics is a big part of his success. Words make a sound as they land, even when they’re just in our thoughts. And that’s where we’re going next.
5/5
Music was a way for men and women to choose partners. Later, it became part of religious experience. In 2008, I wrote about Mozart’s Requiem at Fast Company magazine as an expression of sacred things.
The composition carries with it an aura of mystery that continues to make scholars, musicologists and others spill rivers of ink.5
“With Mozart’s Requiem we become aware that a requiem is not only the occasion for a confrontation with God; it is not religious music to be compared to a Vespers, a Mass, a motet like the Ave verum. From this moment its specificity is defined, in a sacred genre in which not only God but also death becomes the protagonist. Not the death of the opera (...) but that which no sublime could exalt, the knowledge antithetical to every aspiration to live happily...
Unlike what happens in Verdi's Requiem, in Mozart's the accent does not fall on the after death, not on the dark afterlife, but on the before. The death of the Requiem is this ‘before’; not the scandal of an eternal damnation, but what makes the promise of a happy life illusory.
In a letter dated July 7, 1791, Mozart wrote to his wife Constanze: “I cannot explain my feeling to you, it is a certain emptiness—which really hurts me—a certain desire that is never satisfied, and therefore never ceases—it always lasts, indeed it grows day by day.” And ten months earlier: “If people could read my heart, I should almost be ashamed—for me everything is cold, frozen.”
Ernesto Napolitano, Mozart. Verso il Requiem. Frammenti di felicità e di morte
Perhaps it’s this encounter of extremes—happiness and death—that makes Mozart the most relatable to me. His aspiration to happiness, tenacious and ever renewed (from the ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’ to the ‘Marriage of Figaro’ to the ‘Magic Flute’), experienced in a moment in history that exalts its anthropological and philosophical centrality.
A happiness moved by desire, but nourished in a complex of transformations; within an unsuspected moral world that doesn’t pronounce sentences and knows forgiveness: the highest expression of that strange and paradoxical thing that is Mozartian humanism.
At the other end of the spectrum is death, in a comparison with the eighteenth-century Sublime and on the threshold of the sacred—’Idomeneo’, the ‘Mass in C minor’, ‘Don Giovanni’. But above all, a death felt as a farewell, as the exile of every possibility of encountering a happy life: the thought of what is left behind, rather than of what awaits us.
Awe for the sacred takes us back to Cathedrals.
From religion, music morphed into a way to combat fear in battle, and today it’s a form of entertainment. We may mass produce it and streams it, but the experience of music is highly personal. And it outlasts social networks and technology, as was the case with a McDonald jingle revived for MySpace nearly a decade ago.
Even though we’ve transitioned firmly into a secular age, many might say a nihilist phase within it, cathedrals still have a central role in culture. We may have lost our faith in many things, but deep down we still believe in the work.
I watched in horror when the 850-year-old monument that is Notre-Dame de Paris, was engulfed in flames that destroyed the medieval framework and the spire of the cathedral on April 15, 2019.
Maybe that was the state of humanity staring back at us.
For the renovation work,6 masons had to relearn the principles of Gothic architecture, using a wooden frame to put the stones in place and crowning it all with the keystone. Architect Remi Fromont had conducted an in-depth study of the timber frame as part of his university thesis—a template used by the carpenters.
“To restore a building is not to maintain it, to repair, or to rebuild it; it is to re-establish it in a complete state that may never have existed at any given moment.”
– Eugène Viollet-le-Duc
The high-pressure hoses used to fight the fire damaged exterior sculptures—including the famous (not medieval) gargoyles and chimaeras. They set up a workshop in front of the Cathedral to repair and replace the statues. Five of the gargoyles were products of Viollet-le-Duc’s imagination.7 They were computer-scanned and re-made in limestone.
“Beyond its structural achievements, Notre-Dame is a rich tapestry of storytelling and symbolism. The intricate carvings and sculptures that adorn its façades and interiors are far more than decorative elements; they are a narrative device that conveys theological, cultural, and social messages.”
The shapes, the colors, the composition are a reminder of the power of detail in shaping the human experience. Those colors shine down on us once again, if we’re willing to see them and contemplate their role in our lives.
We’re the sum total of emotion and meaning and cathedrals hold that stored value for us, for when we’re ready to explore it and our inner world once again.
Dramatist, novelist, short story writer, and poet, Nobel Prize for Literature laureate. Born in born in Girgenti, Sicily (1867). He studied philology at Rome and at Bonn and wrote a dissertation on the dialect of his native town (1891). A man after my own heart. Though it’s debatable if many of the local lnaguages still spoken in Italy are dialects or actual vulgata, that is a complete language.
He was also professor of aesthetics and stylistics at the Real Istituto di Magistere Femminile at Rome from 1897 to 1922. His work is impressive by its sheer volume. Novellas, but also novels—the most famous being Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904) [The Late Mattia Pascal], I vecchi e i giovani (1913) [The Old and the Young], Si gira (1916) | [Shoot!], and Uno, nessuno e centomila (1926) [One, None, and a Hundred thousand].
But his greatest achievement is the plays. He wrote a large number of dramas published, between 1918 and 1935, under the collective title of Maschere nude [Naked Masks]. His chief preoccupation—the problem of identity. He died on December 10, 1936.
An Emilian specialty, passatelli are prepared with breadcrumbs, eggs and Parmigiano Reggiano: first everything is mixed together and then the mixture is passed through a passatelli iron or a more common potato masher with large holes to obtain the typical shape. As per tradition, passatelli are cooked and served in broth. Recently, some restaurants also serve them drained with rabbit or pumpkin sauce. I’ve had both and they’re delicious!
Curious and available with students, sensitive in encouraging, without directing them, the inclinations of his students, clear and rigorous in expounding complex topics: Luca Serianni’s lesson will always be a guide for future teachers (Italian).
In the farewell lesson of 2017, at a certain point Serianni says, «teachers fulfill their task if they limit themselves to recognizing talents and and putting value into them, without in any way coercing their respective inclinations of study and research. As far as I am concerned, I have tried, as I could and knew how, to stick to this principle. My students all have their own specific profile, within a shared knowledge and method.»
I can recommend two books I’ve long had on my shelf. Words that Work by Frank Luntz, which talks about the importance of preventing message mistakes. Luntz is a political consultant with enough experience to say, “Too often, corporate chieftains have used language as a weapon to obscure and exclude rather than as a tool to inform and enlighten.”
“[T]he order of your words, the visuals that accompany them, and the way they relate to what the audience knows of your personality, your history, your character— all of these elements blend to form a single impression. If even one of these elements is off, if they don't work together seamlessly like the pieces of a puzzle... you risk losing control of your message or, indeed, sending the wrong message altogether.”
And “The more personal the context, the greater the interest.”
The other book is Powerlines by Steve Cone. In addition to slogans, Cone recommends jingles and music to command attention. Hence the power of jingles for marketing, those commercial hymns we hear less and less on television and radio. A few years ago, McDonald’s revived its classic ‘two all-beef patties’ jingle on MySpace, a now defunct social network. They had pulled together up-and-coming talents to create their own versions, then opened up a contest for user-generated versions, including videos.
For whom the bell tolls, a jingle is a memorable ad slogan set to a catchy melody lodges itself in your brain and won’t let go. Music outlasts social networks (and technology).
The score remained unfinished due to the premature death of the Salzburg composer on 5 December 1791. Franz Xavier Sṻssmayr, a student then twenty-five years old completed the universally performed version with the orchestration of the Introit and the Kyrie, as well as the remaining pieces for which Mozart had written the choral part, leaving some sketches for the orchestral part.
The Sanctus, the Benedictus and the Agnus Dei were composed entirely by Sṻssmayr, who wanted to propose the identical thematic material of the double fugue of the Kyrie for the final Lux aeterna, but on the words “cum Sanctis tuis in aeternum.”
As a bonus, archaeologists have been able to access underground areas that date back to hundreds of years before the Notre-Dame cathedral was built. Among the many sets of bones they discovered are those believed to belong to the Renaissance poet Joachim du Bellay.
The luminosity of the stonework in the restored interior is striking. Restorers cleaned the original limestone (40,000 square meters) and sourced replacement stone from quarries in northern France. Tiny features in the original stone—like certain fossils—helped determine its geographical origin.
The cathedral organ has been painstakingly restored, and is now ready to be played after months of tuning each of its 7,952 pipes.
Viollet-le-Duc was the restoration architect. Here’s a fascinating retelling of the process with images and schematics.