Tikkun

Tikkun is the Kabbalistic restoration that Diotallevi presents as a way to repair a world broken into confusion. His account gives cosmic disorder a possible path back to balance: the soul gropes toward light, while the world works through the recombination of the Torah’s letters. Casaubon later places this promise of repair beside his own sense that a breaking of the vessels has already occurred—in a ritual in Rio, and more decisively after his return home.

The Work of Restoration

Diotallevi describes creation as emanating from God through the contraction called simsum. The resulting task is tikkun: the restoration of Adam Qadmon. The world is to be rebuilt in the balanced structure of the par-zufim, or faces and forms, which in his account will take the place of the Sefirot. Restoration is therefore not simply a return to an untouched beginning; it is the reconstitution of an order capable of holding what has become disordered.

The soul’s ascent provides the image of a route through that disorder. Diotallevi compares devout intention to a silk cord, groping in darkness yet able to find a path toward light. At the same time, the world itself strives to recover its natural form by combining the letters of the Torah. Spiritual ascent and textual recombination become parallel forms of repair: both seek a way through confusion toward renewed order.

Casaubon’s Counterimage of Rupture

The doctrine returns in Casaubon’s later account of his state in the hills at night. He contrasts that present moment with his earlier experience in the periscope at the Conservatoire, where he felt trapped among seashells, slugs enclosed in crystal cases, barometers, and rusted clockworks. The surrounding objects seemed to embody a world suspended in deaf hibernation, far from the balanced order Diotallevi had described.

Casaubon retrospectively associates the breaking of the vessels with two stages of collapse. He thinks its first crack may have appeared during the ritual in Rio, but locates the shattering itself in his return to his native country. The rupture is not a single spectacular blow: it happens slowly and soundlessly, leaving everyone caught in a morass of gross matter. His account turns a cosmological image into a measure of inward and historical disorder, without presenting tikkun as an accomplished remedy.

Personal and Historical Stakes

Casaubon says that after returning from Brazil he hardly knew who he was. Approaching thirty, he measures that uncertainty against his father, who at the same age had already been a father and, in Casaubon’s view, knew who he was and where he lived. The contrast gives the cosmic language of restoration an intimate scale: the problem is not only how a world might regain its form, but how a person can remain intelligible to himself amid change.

Distance also shapes Casaubon’s retrospective explanation. While he was in Brazil, extraordinary events were unfolding in Italy, which he experienced from afar as haloed by legend. Near the end of his stay, during an airplane excursion over the Amazon forests, he picked up a local newspaper during a stopover in Fortaleza and recognized on its front page a man he had seen for years sipping white wine at Pilade’s. The caption identified him as the man who had killed Moro. This abrupt conjunction of familiar life and public violence sharpens the gap between the hoped-for restoration of a balanced whole and a history that reaches Casaubon in fragments, after the rupture has already begun.