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The Brilliant Life and Alcoholic Death of Ludovico Silva

High Heights and the Lowest Depths

Neal Hemphill
3 min readAug 5, 2023
Image by Muago, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons / https://tinyurl.com/2ukfj4h5

I bought a book by Ludovico Silva. It was the topic that interested me as I’d never heard of the author.

It turns out that he was a remarkable man. A Venezuelan, he was a poet, philosopher, professor, publisher, and writer who had studied philosophy in Spain, literature in France, and philology in Germany. His writings were prolific and he was widely respected.

I was reading the Foreward to the book when I was brought up short by this quote from his brother Hector:

“Tormented existence? Yes! Together we traveled to alcohol’s chiaroscuro kingdom, together we caroused in the bars and the taverns in the whirlwind…”

And this, from Alberto Toscano, author of the Forward:

“In 1986, Silva would be briefly committed to an asylum for the mental disturbances caused by a ‘demonic acid they called ammonium’, generated by his alcohol consumption…“

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash https://tinyurl.com/y58rdbe7

He was in the asylum for 33 days.

“He would die two years later, at the age of fifty-one, or a heart attack caused…

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Neal Hemphill
Neal Hemphill

Written by Neal Hemphill

Writes about Sobriety/Recovery from Lived Experience of 35+ years. Filmmaker telling stories about the struggles of addiction/recovery @ straightaheadfilms.com

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