https://vegasharmon.com/works/missing-in-action/ Recent content in Missing in Action on Vegas Harmon Hugo en Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/notes-turned-inward-pavese-s-art-of-tragic-living/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/notes-turned-inward-pavese-s-art-of-tragic-living/ The Craft of Living is mostly a set of literary notes, like Leopardi’s Zibaldone, with almost no mention of the history going on all around him. (Pavese’s lively letters, by contrast, are full of talk, gossip, and the quotidian; he comes across as a magisterial man of letters, an efficient manager, and a generous friend.) The diary is, instead, a document of a writer’s intellectual and emotional life, which you can see him process into material. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/when-everything-touched-was-mortal/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/when-everything-touched-was-mortal/ In “The Gods,” the book’s coda, Pavese converses with himself about “how grueling it must have been for people living in a time when everything they touched was mortal,” when the world was filled with the presences of unseen beings. “Do you believe in monsters, believe in animal people, in living stones, divine smiles, and in words that annihilate?” The poet, Pavese implies, is a creature of Chaos—that anarchic state in which good is mixed with bad and monsters mingle with men and gods.