In Their Own Letters

by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The quires came across the courtyard at the hour of the Ave Maria, still soft with ink, carried flat on a board by the boy Cecco so that the leaves would not stick to each other. Mithridates wrote standing up, at a lectern by his window, with the Hebrew book open on a cushion to his left and the Latin growing under his right hand, and he did not sand the pages; he said sand got into the letters and changed them. So the boy carried them on the board like loaves, and laid the board on the count's table between the lamp and the jug of water, and went down to his supper, and the count read.

That summer Fratta smelled of hemp retting in the ditches below the walls, and of the Tiber, which ran low and green past the mills and stank at evening where the women had beaten the washing on the stones. There was sickness at Perugia. The gates there were watched, and a man coming from the east with a cough was turned back at the bridge. Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola and Concordia, twenty-three years old, had come here because the plague was there and not here, and because the house was quiet, and because in Florence and in Arezzo and in every place with a market his name was now a story told with the hands. He had brought mules loaded with books and one Sicilian, and the Sicilian had cost more than the mules.

He drew the first leaf toward him and turned up the wick.

It was a commentary on the letters of the Name, or so Mithridates had written at the head of the quire in red, with the first words of the Hebrew above it in black, square and handsome, the letters standing on the line like men in a doorway. Pico could read them. He had been at the Hebrew for a month now, a whole month, waking and sleeping, and the letters had stopped being shapes and become sounds, and some of the sounds had become words. Shem, a name. Shamayim, the heavens, which the rabbis say is esh and mayim, fire and water, held in one word without quarrelling. He could read a heading. He could not read a page.

So he read the Latin. The Latin said that the letters of the Name were not signs pointing to God, as a painted hand on a wall points to the inn, but were themselves the channels by which the divine flowed down into the world, each letter a conduit and each conduit a degree, so that whoever could pronounce them aright was not naming a thing but touching it. He read it twice. Then he took his own book, the long one in quarto bound in plain calf, in which he was putting the conclusions together in their order, and turned to the leaves where the Kabbalistic ones were growing, and wrote a line, and struck one word, and wrote it again.

It was there. In Plato it was there, in the Cratylus, the names that are not conventions but have a rightness of their own by nature; and in the Hymns of Orpheus, where the god is called by many names and comes to each one; and in Iamblichus, who said the barbarous names must not be translated because their power lay in the sound and not the sense. Three doors in three walls, and behind them the same room. He felt it as a man feels his footing on a ladder in the dark: the rung is there; the next rung will be there; one does not need to see the top.

He turned the leaf.

Halfway down the second page, in the body of the text, in the same brown ink and the same quick slanting hand, between two curved strokes, Mithridates had written:

(sicut fit cum Pico hodie propter cuius pulchritudinem mulieres concurrunt ut coeant secum, precipue Margarita...)

As happens with Pico today, on whose account, because of his beauty, women run together to lie with him, Margherita above all.

It went on. It said that a certain man had offered, in the morning, to bring her to Rome if Pico wished it, though she was with child. Then the curved stroke closed, and the commentary on the letters of the Name resumed as if it had never been interrupted, at the word et.

Pico put his hand flat on the page.

The lamp burned. Somewhere below, in the kitchen, a pan was scraped. He was aware of his own pulse in the side where the wound from Arezzo had closed in June and still pulled when he reached across a table, and he did not reach across the table. He sat and looked at the brackets.

He knew the Hebrew had not said it. He was nearly sure the Hebrew had not said it. There are no Margheritas in a commentary on the Name. And yet the sentence sat in the middle of the text in the hand that had written all the rest, the hand in which, on this same page, the letters of the Name became the channels of the world, and if Pico had not been Pico, if he had been some canon in Bologna who would buy this quire after both of them were dead, he would have read it straight through, the Name and the conduits and the women running together and the child, and supposed the Jews had a strange way of illustrating a doctrine.

He went back to the top of the leaf and read the Latin again, the whole of it, more slowly, looking now not at what it said but at whose it was. Here the Master says. That was the Hebrew, surely; it had the gait of a gloss. And this is the meaning. Was that the Hebrew? And therefore those who know how to join the letters can do what they will. Can do what they will. He had read that sentence ten minutes ago and his heart had gone up in him like a bird off a roof. Now he looked at it and could not tell if it belonged to the rabbi or the Sicilian.

He took up the quire, all eight leaves of it, and held it to the lamp and looked through it, as if the paper might show him which words lay on which.

---

In the morning Mithridates was eating figs.

He ate them at his lectern, standing, from a basket on the floor, splitting each with his thumbs so that the red inside showed, and looking into it before he put it in his mouth as if he were reading something written there. He was a big man, not tall but wide, with a beard he oiled and a Sicilian's way of saying the Latin c softly, so that Cicero came out of his mouth like water poured. He had been a Jew in Sicily and a Christian in Rome and a preacher before the Pope; he had had a cardinal for a patron and spoke of him now as a man speaks of a horse that threw him, and he had taken for his own the name of a king of Pontus who was said to speak the twenty-two languages of his twenty-two peoples. Pico had been told this in Florence and had laughed. He had been told also that Flavius came from Josephus, the Jew who went over to Rome and wrote its history, and he had not laughed at that.

"Count," said Mithridates, "you have not slept."

"I read."

"You read. I write; you read; the boy carries. It is a good economy. Fig?"

Pico did not take a fig. He had the quire under his arm, and he laid it on the sill, open, and put his finger beside the brackets without touching the ink.

Mithridates looked at it. He wiped his thumbs on a cloth. He read his own sentence with his lips moving a little, as he read everything, Latin and Hebrew and Arabic alike, as if each word had to be tasted to be sure it was the one he had put there.

"It is true," he said. "The man who offered was the son of the notary. You can ask him."

"It is not in the book."

"It is in the book. You are holding the book."

"It is not in the Hebrew."

"Ah." Mithridates took another fig and split it and did not eat it. "Now we are speaking of a different book."

Pico took the Hebrew volume off the cushion. Mithridates let him. It was heavy, older than either of them, the parchment gone the colour of a heel of bread, the square letters packed so close the lines seemed woven. He found the place, or what he took to be the place, by the shape of a word he knew, the four letters of the Name with the little crown-strokes on them, and below it a line, and another, and then the next large word. Between the Name and the next large word there were perhaps thirty words of Hebrew. In the Latin, between the same two places, there were ninety. He counted them twice.

"Read it to me," he said. "Aloud. The Hebrew. Word by word, and tell me each one."

Mithridates looked at him for a moment with an expression Pico would remember afterwards and try to name, and fail: not offended, not afraid; something more like the look of a fencing master whose pupil has, for the first time, come in under the guard.

"Word by word," said Mithridates, "is how you translate for children."

"Then I am a child. I have been a child in this language for a month. Read it."

He read it. He read it in the sing-song the Jews use, the voice going up at the end of each phrase like a question and coming down as if it had answered itself, and after each word he said the Latin, porta, et, ascendit, nomen, and Pico followed with his finger on the Hebrew and his eye on the Latin, and the words came, and they were the words on the page, each one, without anything between them. Then the Name, and the crowned letters, and the thirty words, and et. Nothing about the son of the notary. Nothing about Margherita. Nothing, either, about those who know how to join the letters doing what they will.

"Where," said Pico, "is they can do what they will?"

"It is there."

"Show me the word."

Mithridates put the fig in his mouth and chewed it and swallowed it, and then he put his large forefinger, the nail clean and pared and the knuckle dark with ink, not on a word but under a letter. A single letter, at the end of the line: the he, which Pico knew, the breath, the window with the gap at the top.

"There," Mithridates said. "The he is the letter of the will. Anyone who knows anything knows that. The rabbi did not need to write it out, because he was writing for men who knew. I wrote it out, because I am writing for you."

"And Margherita? Which letter is she?"

Mithridates laughed. He had a good laugh, deep, and it seemed to surprise him each time. "She is not in a letter, Count. She is in the margin of my life. I put her between little moons so that you would know her. Did you not know her?"

"I knew her."

"Then the moons did their work."

There was a pause. Through the window came the noise of the mill below the bridge, the wheel knocking on its axle, and a dog, and a woman calling a name that was not either of theirs.

"In Rome," said Mithridates, more quietly, "on the Friday of the Passion, I preached before the Holy Father and the whole college of cardinals. Five years ago. You were in Ferrara, I think, learning to argue. I preached on the death of Christ out of the books of the Jews. And twice in that sermon I gave them sentences in Chaldean, in the language of the Targum, to show them that the rabbis themselves had foretold it. Do you know what letters I wrote them in?"

"No."

"In the letters of the Ethiopians." He took a pen from the lectern and, on the corner of a waste sheet, drew a row of signs Pico had never seen, round-shouldered, with little feet and hooks, like a procession of snails. "The Chaldean words, in the clothes of Prester John. Not one of those cardinals could read Chaldean, and not one could read Ethiopian, and every one of them knew he was in the presence of something ancient. Which he was. The words were true. The letters were a coat. A man may put a true thing in a coat that is not its own, and it is still the true thing."

"And the cardinals went away believing they had heard Ethiopia."

"They went away believing. Is that not what a sermon is for?"

Pico looked at the snails on the waste sheet. He thought of Proteus on his rock in the fourth book of the Odyssey, held fast by Menelaus while he turned into a lion, a serpent, a leopard, a boar, running water, a tree; and how the trick was only to keep hold, through every shape, until he was tired of changing and became himself and answered the question. He looked at Mithridates, who was a Jew and a Christian and a Sicilian and a Roman and a king of Pontus and a historian of the war against Jerusalem, and who was eating figs.

"The Chaldean," Pico said. "You will teach me the Chaldean."

"When you have the Hebrew."

"I have a month of Hebrew."

"You have a month of Hebrew, which is to say you have the alphabet and some nouns and a great deal of courage. Courage is not a declension. When you can read me a page, I will teach you the Chaldean. Not before." He wiped his hands again. "And there will be the question of the price."

"There is always the question of the price."

"With me there is always the question of the price," Mithridates agreed. "I am not a Florentine; I do not pretend it is a gift between friends and then send the account to your steward. I tell you at the door."

Pico took the quire back off the sill and the Hebrew volume from the cushion. Mithridates did not stop him taking the Hebrew either. He watched him go to the door with it, and when Pico was already on the stair, he called after him, not loudly, in Hebrew, a short sentence that Pico did not understand, and then laughed again, alone in his room among the figs.

---

He worked in the evening. At the Ave Maria the boy came up with the board empty, for the first time that summer, and stood holding it until Pico sent him down to his supper. Then he worked, with the Hebrew volume open on the table and the Latin beside it and between them the little grammar he had made himself in the first week from what Mithridates had set him: the alphabet down the left margin, the sounds beside it, the commonest roots in a column on the right with their meanings. His eyes were sore. He bathed them from the jug and went on.

He did not go to the Name. He went to the first line of the commentary, where the rabbi began, and he read it himself.

It took him the length of a candle. He found the root and lost it and found it again under a prefix he had not recognised; he mistook a resh for a dalet and made the rabbi say that the soul was poor when he meant that it was a dwelling; he caught it, struck it out, and wrote the right word above. He found that the Latin for this line said what the Hebrew said, more or less, and in the same order, and this gave him a pleasure so sharp it was nearly pain, not because Mithridates had been faithful there but because he, Giovanni, could see it. He went on to the next line. The candle guttered and he lit another from it.

Toward the end of the second candle he turned the Latin on past the place of the Name, to see how much of the quire remained, and found the second note.

It was not between moons this time. It was in the margin, small, written up the side of the page so that he had to turn the quire on its edge to read it, and the ink was darker, as if it had been added later, after the page was dry.

O Pice, magna sunt hec, sed impossibile est ut intelligantur a te nisi in propriis literis et verbis hebraicis.

O Pico, these things are great, but it is impossible that they be understood by you except in their own Hebrew letters and words.

He read it and sat back.

Below him the house was silent; the boy slept in the kitchen by the hearth; across the courtyard there was no light in the Sicilian's window. The river ran under the bridge with the sound of someone pouring from a great height into a basin that never filled. He thought of the rock at Pharos, and of the hands that keep hold.

There was a sentence in the Hebrew, on the page in front of him, that Mithridates had not put into Latin at all. He had seen it while counting; a short line, eight or nine words, between two longer ones, and in the Latin nothing for it, a clean seam, the gloss running straight from the line above to the line below. He had not asked about it in the morning. He had kept it back, as a man keeps back one coin when he is shown a purse.

He drew the candle closer and set his finger under the first word of it.

It took him until the cocks at the mill began. Three of the words he knew. Two he found in his column of roots. One he could not find anywhere, and he wrote it out in its own letters on the waste sheet three times, larger each time, as if size would make it speak, and it did not, and he left a space for it. The last two words were the Name again, written not with its four letters but with the small sign the scribes use for it, two little yod side by side, which he had seen in a Psalter and had not understood until tonight. When he had them all he had this, in his own Latin, on the waste sheet, with the space in it:

and the man who has no ——— of his own takes the form of every degree.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he put it beside the Sicilian's note in the margin, and beside the brackets with Margherita in them, and beside the Ethiopian snails, which he had taken from Mithridates' waste sheet without being asked, and folded into his sleeve, and which lay now on the table near the candle. He did not know what the missing word was. It might be place. It might be portion. It might be nature. He sat with the three possibilities as he would have sat with three readings of a disputed line of Aristotle, holding each up in turn, and he found that he could not choose, and that each of them made the sentence true, and that he wanted it to be the third so much that he did not trust himself to write it.

He did not write it.

He took his pen, and in the margin of the Sicilian's quire, under O Pice, magna sunt hec, in letters that leaned and wavered and were much too large, with every yod too long, he wrote in Hebrew characters the Latin word intellexi, I have understood, spelled out sound by sound in the alphabet of the rabbis as Mithridates had spelled Chaldean in the alphabet of Prester John. Then he crossed it through with one stroke, so that it could still be read, and wrote above it, in the same unsteady square hand, with the final mem not quite closed, the Latin word intelligam: I will understand.

The ink would not dry. He did not sand it. He left the quire open on the board for the boy to carry back across the courtyard in the morning, and he put the Hebrew book on top of his own book of conclusions, the old parchment on the new paper, and opened the shutter, and the air came in off the Tiber smelling of hemp and of the cold that comes before light. Across the yard, in the Sicilian's window, someone was striking a flint.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Iōanne Pīcō Mīrandulānō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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