I thought I would read until about 13
after 9:00 since we started at about quarter
after 8:00, if that's all right?
In Kenya, as all of you probably know,
there are these big savannas where wild animals--
I mean, vast thousands of acres of savanna
where wild animals live in their natural state.
And if you're a tourist to Kenya,
you can go out in a minibus and see them.
And it's a very extraordinary experience.
I was particularly impressed by the lions
because the one thing that--
I noticed all these animals, like thousands
of animals, zebra and wildebeest all on their tiptoes
all over the savanna.
Huge herds of them.
And antelope all on tiptoe sniffing the air.
And then you drive for a long way,
and then you see a lion lying down
like this with a lioness or two.
And what they're all sniffing for is when that lion wakes up.
The lions feed every three days.
They go out and kill.
Then they eat enough to sleep for three days.
And the whole-- what I was so struck by
was that the whole life of the savanna
seems to be dependent on this one animal.
The lion can't kill big elephants.
I'm not going to give a lecture on the animals.
But a lion can kill a baby elephant,
so the elephants are very wary of the lion, in any case.
"Kenya.
Savanna."
I'll just read this part about the lion.
In the great bracing air of Kenya, the lion runs.
Seeing a lion and two lionesses together,
the Italian woman said--
È il leone, la sua moglie, e la sua madre--Id est,
the wife's mother, a sort of chaperone to the lion
and to his wife.
The lion's muscles are amazing.
The air is filled with lion's grace.
Viewed without any human component around,
the lion is sensational, simply of and in himself.
Luciano, on the other hand, returned from a Montale
conference, the first one celebrating
the first anniversary of Montale's death,
says he is exhausted.
Says it in Italian.
And turning neither like a lion nor a roebuck
nor any other of the lion's prey, those ones who are always
on tiptoe sniffing for the lion, into the elevator
goes, in America, up to his apartment.
Power in the forefoot and power in the back, the sleep
musculature doubling up all over or seeming to before
leaping to attack.
I spent $10 on a book that would have
cost $2 any place else just to have something to read,
anything about the lions.
A lion is sleeping.
Another lion, a lioness, a girl is almost sleeping at his side.
Being depressed is middle class, said Cornelia's mother.
But this is not enough.
The lion is not depressed, it's true,
but neither does he have a social class.
The lion is not upper class.
He is dirty.
He lets things fall all over him.
He is uncouth.
He lies around with a lioness asleep all day.
Yes, you left me to run around without you and by myself.
At least you didn't leave me out there on the savanna,
subject to the appetites of the lions.
The lion stands up with a great deal of assurance.
He is not a romantic sort.
The lioness is there, and he is there.
Together, they form smaller lion animals.
These run, jump, play, and attack.
Any one of them could give me, if I saw him alone,
a heart attack.
The lion is admirable in one way.
But in another, he just fills up his stomach
and then sleeps until he's hungry again.
And then does the same.
Doing this, he is powerful.
People who live this way become fat and uninteresting.
The lion, however, knows when he is hungry.
When he is old, it is hard for him to hunt.
The lion becomes mangy and weak.
Sometimes, just for a second, his old grandeur shows through.
He evokes the fear of death in some young giraffe or antelope
or wildebeest at the close of day.
The Anglo-Saxon poet characteristically
presents himself as a good lover,
wrote Arthur Waley; the Chinese poet, as a good friend.
The African poet often writes poems to his mother.
Sometimes the mother is Africa.
He presents himself not as a son,
who is there to work and to help to keep away the lions,
but as a son who, gone far away, still
thinks with passion of the warmth
and other attractions of his first home.
Is the lion awake?
What roaring Americans at the windows of my motel.
No.
It's not the Americans.
It's not a lion either.
It's some elephants making a ferocious racket,
breaking all the limbs, both live and dead branches
from the trees.
That's the end of the part about the lion.
I will conclude by--
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.