The Baron in the Trees

How this passion which Cosimo always showed for communal life fitted in with his perpetual flight from society, I have never properly understood, and it remains not the least of his singularities of character. One would say that the more determined he was to hide away in his den of branches, the more he felt the need to create new links with the human race. But although every now and again he flung himself, body and soul, into organizing a new fellowship, suggesting detailed rules and aims, choosing the aptest men for every job, his comrades never knew how far they could count on him, and when he would suddenly be urged back into the bird side of his nature and let himself be caught no more. Perhaps, if one tried, one could take these contradictory impulses back to a single impulse. One should remember that he was just as contrary to every kind of human organization flourishing at the time, and so he fled from them all and tried experiments with new ones. But none of these seemed right or different enough from the others. From this came his constant periods of utter wildness.

What he had in mind was an idea of a universal society. And every time he busied himself getting people together, either for a definite purpose such as guarding against fire or defending them from wolves, or in confraternities of trades such as the Perfect Wheelwrights or the Enlightened Skin Tanners, since he always got them to meet in the woods, at night, around a tree from which he would preach, there was always an air of conspiracy, of sect, of heresy, and in that atmosphere his speeches also passed easily from particular to general, and from the simple rules of some manual trade moved far too easily to a plan for installing a world republic of men -- equal, free and just.

-- Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees