Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  Someone who has lost all hope of ever being happy cannot think about the happiness of others, because man can only seek it in relation to his own. He cannot therefore even take an interest in the unhappiness of others. (30 Aug. 1821.)

  Would you like to see the influence of opinion and habituation on the judgment and, so to speak, physical sense we have of proportions, indeed, how this sense stems wholly from the causes mentioned and is wholly determined by them? [1590] Observe a tall, bulky woman next to a well-proportioned man. You cannot help but judge and seem to see that the woman’s dimensions are greater, strictly speaking, than those of the man. Compare measurements, however, and you will very often find them to be equal, or those of the man to be greater. Observe a well-proportioned woman next to a small man. The same effect and the illusion will occur. Likewise in other such cases. These are therefore optical illusions, but what causes them? What is it that deceives our senses? Opinion and habituation. (30 Aug. 1821.) At the theater in Bologna I saw a woman dressed as a man; she looked like a doll. In another act she made her entrance as another character, playing a female part; she seemed to me, as indeed she was, a fine figure of a woman.1

  There is no evidence that Roman customs were passed on to the Greeks, not even after Constantine. I do not mean any particular custom, but the kind and general form of customs, such as actually did pass from the Greeks to the Romans, and from the French to the Italians, chiefly, and to other civilized peoples in varying degrees. Once the customs of the Greeks were fully formed, they communicated them to others, but they never again received them from anyone else. Hence the long-lasting incorruptibility of their language, and [1591] its endurance up to the present. The tenacious hold the Greeks always had on their own affairs, and the exclusive love they bore, and bear, their nation and their fellow citizens is a marvel. I have heard of some Greek colonies still surviving in Corsica and Sicily where the colonists still speak Greek, retain Greek customs, and have close ties only with one another, even though they live in a territory occupied by a different nation, and are subject to a foreign government. Travelers’ accounts of Greece, and of other countries inhabited by Greeks, confirm this invincible tenacity. Where Catholic and schismatic Greeks are found alongside other Catholics, the Greek Catholics, despite the ban on their religion and their bishops (for the most part foreigners), and the sway these things hold over their opinion, would rather join themselves in marriage, etc., with their schismatic fellow nationals than with foreign Catholics, forge close alliances with one another, and often drift from one religion to the other. This observation could be related to the disappointing outcome of the multiple negotiations entered into at the time of the Council of Florence,1 in order to subject the Greek Church to the Latin and induce it to recognize a foreign [1592] authority. It is well known that while the Latin rite was established in almost the whole of the rest of Christendom, the Greek rite, and within it the Greek language, was and is preserved throughout the whole of the Greek communion, in no matter which country. And the privileges of the Greek Catholic Church are also well known, and the kind of independence that is accorded it, and the resistance it habitually puts up even to that portion of control which the Latin Church continues to exercise over it.

  And is not the present state of the Greeks astonishing? The Gothic, Lombard, etc., races are no longer distinguished from the Italian, nor the Frankish from the Celtic or the Roman, nor the Moorish from the Spanish. The languages, too, are confused in these countries, etc. In Persia, the Arabs can never be distinguished from the Persians, the Arab religion is everywhere established, and the Persian language wholly mixed up with Arabic. Tartar races and customs are gradually merging in China with Chinese races and customs. But the Greeks have never become Turks, nor the Turks Greeks. Two religions, two languages, two kinds of customs and usages, inclinations and characters, etc., in short, two entirely dissimilar nations live together in a country, where one is still foreign though lord and master, [1593] the other still native though a slave. And if Greek customs, and hence the language, have changed from what they once were, this change derives rather from time, and from other inevitably altering circumstances, than from everyday dealings with a foreign nation. The present modification of Greek customs and temperament is almost wholly independent of Turkish customs and temperament, and time has tended rather to remove from than add anything to them. The current revolution in Greece, in which Greeks from almost all of their territories, even the most distant, take part, which has united a slave nation and rendered it formidable, etc. etc., is a demonstration of the national spirit of the Greeks, the memory of their own affairs and their tenacious hold on them, the most singular union of individuals from a people of slaves, the hatred they feel for the foreign populace with whom, and under whom they have lived for so long, in short, a national hatred inseparable from a love that is national and a source of life, etc. (see p. 1606, paragraph 1). The Parga affair, etc., is also relevant here.1 (30 Aug. 1821.)

  The Hottentots generally have a fatty growth below the coccyx. The sexual parts of their women are of a singular construction.2 Are we to believe that these singularities strike them as ugly? On the contrary, would not someone without such attributes seem ugly to them? (31 Aug. 1821.)

  [1594] The power of opinion, habit, etc., and how it is that everything is relative, may also be seen in the words, expressions, concepts, and images of poetry and prose viewed comparatively. A comparison that can easily be made, by showing, e.g., how a not unusual word or statement, which has no impact in prose because we are accustomed to it, may have one in verse, etc. etc., and you can see p. 1227. (31 Aug. 1821.)

  Beauty is the natural companion of virtue. A man who does not have long experience cannot get used to the belief that a beautiful face might mask a wicked soul. And he would be right, for nature has established an effective correspondence between outward and inward forms, and if they do not correspond, they are for the most part altered from what they naturally were. Anyway, it is certain that the beautiful are for the most part bad. I say the same of the other natural or acquired advantages. A person in possession of them is not good. An ugly man, someone deprived of good points and advantages, will more easily advance toward virtue. Men without talent are more usually good than are those who have an abundance of it. All this is very natural in society. Man prides himself on the advantage that he sees [1595] he has over others, and tries to profit by it as best he can. If he is strong, he employs his strength. The weak entrust themselves to and follow the path that most benefits and pleases others in order to win them over. The strong don’t need to do this. That’s what the abuse of advantage amounts to, an inevitable and certain abuse, once you have society. The same is true of the powerful, etc., who cannot be virtuous. Among private citizens it seems to me that you will not find genuine affability, genuine and consistently friendly manners, interest on behalf of others, etc., except in the ugly, in one who is disadvantaged in some way, born in a lowly state, accustomed to it since childhood, even if he has since left it, in one who is poor, or was, or in the unfortunate.

  Now my question is this. Are beauty, intelligence, etc. etc., advantages, or are they not? Virtue, etc., a measure of decorum, etc. etc., are they or are they not intended by nature? (Assuredly they are, since children and young people are always inclined to follow them.) What strange contradiction is it then that in the state of society natural and acquired advantages are almost wholly incompatible with goodness of behavior? And that, in order to find the latter, you have to [1596] want this or that person to be ugly, foolish, etc. etc.? Indeed, want the majority of men, or all of them, were that possible, to be like that for the good of the world? (The devout, in fact, are in the habit of calling these and similar handicaps the favors and blessings of God.)1 What does all this mean? That the social state is in contradiction with nature, and with itself. For the social state itself cannot subsist without virtue and morality, the sole bond between men, the sole sufficient guarantee of order and s
ociety, etc., and the latter cannot exist with something else that is likewise necessary to the good of society, namely, individual advantages and benefits. What I say of individuals also goes for nations. It is well known how justice, etc. etc., tend to be observed by weak or unlucky, etc., nations and princes and wholly disregarded by the rest, and by the former, too, once they reach good fortune and strength, as came about in Rome. (31 August 1821.)

  The above, if nothing else, can be applied to the demonstration of the inborn and essential contradictions contained in a state of civilization such as we have at present. (31 Aug. 1821.)

  [1597] Everything in nature is harmony, but, above all, nothing in it is contradiction.1 It is not possible, especially in a single individual, in a single genus of beings, the loftiest beings in the natural order, such as man is, that the perfection of one of its principal and most important parts, willed and ordained by nature, should harm the perfection of another, no less principal part. Now, if what we call our perfection of spirit, if current civilization had been willed and ordained by nature, and if, in short, it were really our perfection, the absurd contradiction stated above would be realized, since it is indisputable that this supposed perfection of the spirit harms the body.

  First of all recall what I have explained elsewhere [→Z 96, 115], that bodily weakness benefits the exercise and development of the mental faculties, especially those pertaining to reason, and physical vigor harms them. And conversely, the exercise and development of these faculties greatly harms the vigor and well-being of the body. Thus Celsus holds that the enfeeblement of [1598] men, and illnesses, derive from study, and each thinker or scholar experiences it for himself as regards the individual deterioration of his body.1 And not only because of the physical toil, but in myriad other ways the development of reason harms the body, by the pains it causes, the ills it uncovers, which had they remained unknown would not have been ills, the lack of physical activity to which it drives us, even as a matter of principle, and the countless fine effects that make up civilization and the current state of the world and come almost entirely from the development of reason. If, then, the infinite development of reason constitutes the proper perfection of man, nature, I repeat, is in contradiction, because the perfection of one part harms that of another, and will in the end destroy it, whether bit by bit or at a single point, by means of suicide. Indeed, not only does the perfection of one part harm that of another, but a perfection of one and the same part or of the whole harms another perfection that was clearly intended by nature.

  The development of reason, and the civilization that derives from it, seems to us a perfection proper not only to the human mind, but also [1599] to the body, that is, in short, to man as a whole. So my question is: are illnesses, debility, failing strength, frailty, and extreme sensitivity perfections of the human body and of man? Is it not obvious that nature intended us to be good and healthy, and robust? Everything can be doubted, but not the fact that nature has always looked to the physical well-being of its creatures. This is a truth that may be intuited, and there is therefore no need to prove it. Nature placed a thousand obstacles in the way of the development of reason, etc., but favored the full development of our bodily faculties, and the vigor of the body, etc. etc., in every respect. Men have needed many centuries to arrive at this development of reason, but the development of the human body was perfect from the start, and, on the contrary, has deteriorated as time and civilization have advanced. Whether by means of innate dispositions or accidental but inevitable and ordinary dispositions, nature has denied most intellects the possibility either of being developed or of reaching supposed perfection in whatever way, but to no one, unless because of fortuitous and unpredictable impediments, has it denied the capacity to [1600] pursue bodily well-being. On the contrary, if we set aside these fortuitous and extraordinary impediments, bodily well-being is something we naturally bring with us at birth. It is therefore obvious that nature has established the perfection of vigor, etc. etc., in the human body, and that complete well-being and the bloom of bodily health is a perfection that is in no way accidental, but intrinsic and proper to man, and ordained for him by nature as it is for all other creatures. Indeed, it is obvious that in man, as in other creatures, nature paid more heed to the body than to the mind, and consequently that its perfection is wholly intended by nature, and consequently whatever is opposed to this cannot be man’s perfection, since it clashes with his proper and natural essence, and conflicts with a quality that is not accidental but ordained by nature. Besides, who can deny that bodily and sensory shortcomings, a kind of powerlessness which we readily feel cannot be natural, are opposed to, and disproportionate to our own inclinations, and to the very forces of the mind we have cultivated, and still do cultivate, who would deny, I repeat, that weakness, habitual or current illnesses, and the supreme ease with which we succumb to them, etc. etc., are imperfections in man?

  [1601] Now there are a thousand other proofs that civilization really has greatly damaged the human body, and goes on damaging it and reducing its vigor, but we shall simply consider this one. There is no denying what so many eminently trustworthy writers of antiquity, and also some eyewitnesses, tell of the extraordinary physique of the Gauls and the Germans before they were civilized. Now, through civilization, they are reduced to the ordinary form, and one can well believe that the same came about in other peoples whose civilization is more ancient. I leave aside Greek and Roman athletes, on whose strength see Celsus.1 On the normal strength of Roman soldiers, see Montesquieu, Grandeur, etc., ch. 2, p. 15, note, pp. 16ff.2 That the nosology of the ancients was more limited than that of the moderns is evident.3 But they were already very civilized, especially in, e.g., Celsus’s time. The nosology of savage peoples runs to very few pages, and their ordinary state of health and robustness is plain to all who visit them, even in the harshest climates. In short, it is more than obvious that the nosology increases in volume, [1602] and that human health decreases, in proportion to civilization. This may also be seen in the bloodlines of horses, bulls, etc., which gradually grow weaker and degenerate when they have passed from the woods to our stables, and to a less uncivilized life. The same is true of carefully cultivated plants, etc. They will gain delicacy, etc. etc., but will always lose strength, etc. etc., and if through that delicacy they are better adapted to our uses (especially in our present state, which is so different from the natural one), that does not prove that they are not degenerate. In effect, the principal natural quality, the principal material perfection intended and ordained by nature in all that lives or grows is not delicacy, etc., but vigor relative to each kind of being. Vigor is health, see p. 1624; vigor is potency; it is the faculty of executing fully all the appropriate operations, etc. etc.; it is the facility to live. Vigor, in short, is everything in nature, and nature is not principally and characteristically delicate but strong in respect of, and in proportion to, the capacity, etc., of each of its parts.1 (31 Aug.–1 Sept. 1821.) See p. 1606, end.

  [1603] From the observations stated above, there follows another strong proof as to how the idea of the beautiful is relative and mutable, and depends not on any invariable model, but on habits that change with circumstances. Today, the idea of the beautiful almost intrinsically contains an idea of delicacy. A robust country man or woman certainly does not appear beautiful to city folk. Where our ideas are concerned, the beautiful wholly excludes the coarse. Wherever the latter is found (unless it happens in some measure that, by means of the extraordinary and the improper itself, it produces grace) the beautiful, at least the perfectly beautiful, is not found as far as we are concerned. Now it is certain that primitive men thought quite otherwise, because all primitive men were coarse. None of those forms that we call beautiful existed then (this may be seen among savages, who do not feel beauty less than we do though they do not feel ours), and if it had existed, it would have been, and would have been called, ugly. Delicacy, therefore, does not enter into the idea that natural man conceive
s of the beautiful. Hence the [1604] current idea of the beautiful is not at all natural, indeed it is the opposite. And yet it appears utterly natural to us, who confuse the natural with the spontaneous. For this idea is spontaneous, because it derives from habits, without any influence of the will, etc.

  It is probable that whereas today the foundation or universal condition of the beautiful is delicacy, for the primitives it was what we call coarseness, because our state, and hence our habits and ideas, are in precisely this point diametrically opposed to the primitive and natural (and savage) ones. But even if delicacy did enter into the primitive idea of the beautiful, whether as extraordinary and therefore graceful, or in some other way, it was a delicacy utterly different from the sort that today is deemed indispensable to beauty. It was a much lesser delicacy, and such that it would seem to us not far short of coarseness and even of crudity. As conversely present-day delicacy would have appeared excessive, improper, and ugly to the primitives. The idea of delicacy, in short, may have found its way into the primitive conception of the beautiful (especially as conceived by men in respect of women, in whom a certain delicacy is proper by nature, and therefore appropriate, but only respectively, and proportionately, and with regard to the different nature of men, etc.),1 but only in the way I have said. And thus all beauty is relative. And proportionate differences [1605] are to be found between the ancient beautiful and the modern, between the beautiful of one nation and that of another, between the beautiful of the Italians and that of the French, etc. etc. (1 Sept. 1821.) See p. 1698.