Finding Sanity in Sprezzatura: The Lost 16th-century Italian Art of Living with Fluency, Serenity, and Openness to Wonder

Language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great danger is that we come to mistake the shape for the substance, reducing concepts and experiences we cannot name or contain to the words tasked with holding the spill of the ineffable. (This is what makes The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows so miraculous.) The more complex and tessellated the concept, the emotion, the experience, the more deficient the word for it and the more urgent the yearning to speak it with the tongue of the mind, to give it shape in sound and meaning in metaphor.… read article