A Free Mind

The Worm of Consciousness and Other Essays, by Nicola Chiaromonte. Edited by Miriam Chiaromonte. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 270 pp.

Nicola Chiaromonte was an essayist in the original sense of that curious and difficult word. One feels that he is writing always to make a test or trial of his own meaning. Plato, the philosopher whose name he most often invokes, taught the proper use of dialectic against the seduction of rhetoric, and Chiaromonte has the purity of an inquiring spirit. The whole bias of his nature is opposed to the conceit of writing as performance, which is a uniquely modern debasement and exaltation of rhetoric. He seems to be saying, not “Here is my mind; see how it works,” b...