Do not insert in text. Here’s an idiomatic Grice vignette (plain text, no bullets, no italics), using your “twelve months / twelve discourses” conceit and weaving in Belsyre Court, the courtly irony, and Gricean implicature. I keep your Italian titles, but I let Grice comment on their English glosses as part of the joke.
I took Cocconato’s book back with me to Belsyre Court, as if it were a library copy in the old Oxford sense: not so much borrowed as provisionally annexed. I had decided—rather grandly, and with the sort of annual resolution one ordinarily makes only about whisky—that 1947 would be my year of Grice. Not that I intended to write a book called that; merely to live as if I might, which is a milder ambition and therefore, by Oxford standards, more dangerous.
Radicati—Cocconato, as I persist in calling him—had provided me with a programme. He had meant his twelve discourses as a monthly ration for a king; I proposed to use them as a monthly ration for a don. The king, in 1729, was to have one discourse per month for his leisure; the don, in 1947, would have one discourse per month for his sanity. One ought to be careful with such analogies, of course. Kings abdicate; dons merely lapse into committee-work.
The list itself has a reassuring air of order. It is almost too orderly, like a syllabus. One feels the implicature at once: if there are twelve discourses, then a year may be governed; if a year may be governed, then a life may be governed; and if a life may be governed, then perhaps even a kingdom. This, as it happens, is precisely the sort of implicature that tempts a monarch into thinking philosophy is a branch of administration.
The twelve are these—at least as Cocconato prints them, with the kind of seriousness which makes a title look like a civic duty:
L’importanza dell’educazione. Il concetto di virtù. L’idea di giustizia. Analisi storica dell’Impero Romano (and its decline, as if empires decline by the month like household accounts). L’importanza della religione (and its impact on society, which is a polite way of saying: its impact on rulers). Il concetto di libertà (and its relationship with government, which is another polite way of saying: how much liberty can be tolerated). Critica della monarchia francese (always safer, when advising a monarch, to criticise someone else’s monarchy). L’importanza del commercio. Il concetto di guerra. Analisi storica dell’Impero Ottomano. L’importanza dell’agricoltura. Appello alla responsabilità individuale.
You can see the rhythm: education, virtue, justice—then history to frighten you; religion to steady you; liberty to tease you; France to amuse you; commerce to reassure you; war to sober you; the Ottomans to remind you the world is large; agriculture to remind you the world is hungry; and finally, like the last line of a sermon, responsibility—individual, of course, because collective responsibility is always somebody else’s.
I arranged them, in my mind, like a calendar pinned to the wall of the study. January would begin with education, because Oxford always begins with education and never quite ends it. February would take virtue, because February is the month in which virtue is most needed. March would attempt justice, because March is when one begins to suspect that winter has been unjust. And so on, each discourse assigned its season as if ideas had weather.
But Belsyre Court is not Versailles, and the implicatures change when a book is taken from a palace to a flat. In a court of flats, “the importance of commerce” is not a treatise; it is the shop-front under your window. “The concept of war” is not a chapter; it is the neighbour’s wireless and the memory one cannot quite turn down. “Agriculture” is not an economic base; it is the faint smell of earth on someone’s boots and the distant fact that bread arrives every morning as if by miracle, which is a theological point disguised as a delivery.
Still, the scheme had its charm. A discourse a month. A steady diet. A private concordat between my conscience and my bookshelf. If Cocconato thought he was giving a monarch twelve pleasant reads, he was also giving him twelve small excuses—twelve ways of feeling that something had been done merely by reading. I am not a king; but I am an Oxford don, which is a different kind of sovereignty, and not necessarily a more modest one. The danger is the same: to confuse the consumption of discourse with the exercise of reason.
So I told myself, on the stairs at Belsyre, key in hand, that I would read one per month and do, at least once per month, something that counted as responsibility rather than commentary. That is the difference between 1729 and 1947. A king can abdicate. A don, alas, can only adjourn.
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