A Conversation About Technology and Humanity: Guardini's Letters from Lake Como

Imagine yourself on a crowded Italian street. An old man catches your eye and invites you to have coffee with him. In minutes you are away from the bustle of the market and sitting in a cafe hidden from the greedy eyes of the tourists. You listen as he describes the changes that have come over Europe in the twentieth century. At first he seems nostalgic in the way old people are supposed to be. But as you listen, it becomes clear that something has been lost: something beautiful, strong, human. Could this man hold the secret to recovering it?

In Letters from Lake Como, Romano Guardini addresses the reader in a series of letters that form a series of inquiries on the different ways in which technology is reshaping our world. Written between 1923 and 1925, these letters still offer penetrating insight into the nature of these technological changes. The main difference in seventy-five years is that these changes have been more broadly disseminated and have grown more intense. Guardini speaks to those individuals who can still hear him, and like the hypothetical old man in a cafe, he invites us to contemplate what has been gained and what has been lost.

In each letter, Guardini examines different aspects of technology. The changes of the modern world have been so wide sweeping that trying to describe them is like wrestling with Proteus, the ever-changing sea god. Artifice, abstraction, consciousness, survey, mastery, the masses: these themes attempt to name the legion of changes to our world. And yet in each letter he refuses to let go of the particular. He presents us with one example, describing in beautiful detail a sailboat. Next, he describes the technology of a primitive sailboat transformed into a modern ocean liner. He marvels over the great accomplishment of the ocean liner. But then he observes that "people on board eat and drink and sleep and dance," and further that "they live as if in houses and on city streets" (13). What has been lost is that "we are no longer plunged into the sphere of wind and water as birds and fishes are" (12). He confronts us in a very personal way with each major aspect of the new world. Once he is certain that we have understood him, he moves on to his next theme.

The bulk of Guardini's examples are drawn from the area around Lake Como, in Italy. This sailboat, this neighborhood of ancient homes interrupted by a modern dwelling, this aristocratic palace. The letters collect, as it were, individual tiles to present us with a vision in mosaic of classical humanity. Guardini is our personal guide to all of the interstices and enclaves of the old world. If he were merely a nostalgic old man, we could mourn with him for what has passed. But his goal is to reveal those human values which the classical world guarded and preserved in the midst of all of its technical accomplishments. By showing how the new has interrupted amid the old, he shows how this proportion, this balance has disintegrated. We must undergo a kind of kenosis, or emptying ourselves of attachment to the old forms of beauty.

The final letter of the series invites us to consider the future. The old world has passed. But will we be able to match its achievements in sheltering and preserving human values? Perhaps. There are signs of hope in certain new structures "in which technology has been given true form" (92). The critical task is to exercise human control to shape the new technologies. Guardini admits that this last letter is his weakest. It is one thing to describe what has been completed, another to sketch forth what is only now coalescing. In any case, Guardini has done the decisive work in his earlier essays. He has made us see the great syntheses of the ancient world and the middle ages, and invited us to meet the challenge in the modern age.


Letters from Lake Como:
Explorations in Technology and the Human Race
By Romano Guardini
Introduction by Louis Dupre
Translated by Geoffrey Bromiley
Paperback, 115 pages
Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Ressourcement Series

This review was originally published April 2000 at Aqua et Ignis