Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  5th. Each of the national dialects is foreign outside of its region, in the same nation. A great number of the sixteenth-century writers, Tuscan or not, prose writers or poets, wrote, as is well known, in the Tuscan dialect, or at least they embellished their writings with it. As a result they were considered elegant. But although they wrote in the Tuscan dialect of their time, that elegance, among all non-Tuscan readers, also derived from the unusual. And among the Tuscans, too, it derived from the unusual, because, as common words and idioms were transferred to writing, these seemed extraordinary even to the Tuscans, not in themselves but in writing. And I have explained elsewhere [→Z 1806ff.] how in writing even familiarity, and ordinary words and expressions, can seem elegant, [2543] not as ordinary, but as extraordinary and unusual in orderly, careful, civil (πολιτικὴ), and cultured writing. And this is the case especially in poetry, where many used the Tuscan vernacular, even in poetry that wasn’t comic, as Firenzuola, etc., does. In short, ordinary language often gives elegance to writing, precisely because, being ordinary, it is not at home in the writing of men of letters, and seems unfamiliar there. Add that to a great number of these same Tuscan readers (not plebeian, naturally), many words used by their or other writers, taken from the language of their people, seemed and seem new or not very familiar. Besides, the elegance deriving from the use of the Tuscan dialect in cultivated writing is sometimes less for the Tuscans because it’s not so unfamiliar or is ordinary, and sometimes greater because it’s not too unfamiliar, not so out of the ordinary that it degenerates into the inappropriate, the affected, etc., as it often does for other Italians. The Tuscans accuse Botta, when he Florentinizes in his history, of being too ordinary and pedestrian, and in short inelegant.1 And in general the elegance that they sense in it, and [2544] that in cultured writing derives from the accustomed, from the ordinary, etc., is of a different flavor and quality from the elegance produced by the absolutely unfamiliar. For the accustomed and the ordinary is not unfamiliar for readers, except relatively, that is, with respect to cultured writing. (30 June‒2 July 1822.)

  What I’ve said elsewhere [→Z 1624–25] about the way that Greek expresses illness, that is, as weakness (ἀσθένɛια), should also be said of Latin, infirmitas, infirmus [infirmity, infirm]. (4 July 1822.) Likewise also languor [faintness, weakness], etc.

  Of the life and situation of Homer nothing is known. And yet amid this universal ignorance one very old and universal and enduring tradition is maintained, and although nothing is known, this one thing is claimed, and considered certain: that he was poor and wretched. Thus renown did not want it left in doubt, or purely in terms of conjecture that the first and highest of [2545] poets met the common fate of those who followed him. And the example of the ἀρχηγὸς [founder] of this unhappy family confirms that anyone who has a truly, powerfully poetic soul (I mean every man of vivid imagination and keen feeling, whether he writes or not, in prose or in verse) is inevitably destined from birth to unhappiness. (4 July 1822.)

  Simple and natural men find the cultured, the studied, and even the affected much more delightful and graceful than the simple and the natural. Conversely, there is no quality or thing more graceful in the eyes of civilized and cultured men than the simple and the natural, words that in our languages and in our speech are very often synonyms of graceful, and confused with it, as grace is confused with naturalness and simplicity, in the belief that they are essentially, and naturally, and in themselves, [2546] graceful qualities. In that we are deceived. The graceful is merely the extraordinary as extraordinary, pertaining to beauty within the terms of what is fitting. The too simple is not graceful. Something will be too simple for the French, and not for us. It will be for us too, and nevertheless will still be on this side of the natural. (So distant are we from nature, and so extraordinary it appears to us.) I say the opposite of the civilized with respect to the savage, natural, uncultured, etc. Besides, we can also see in our peasant women, who are much less attracted by the simple and natural, or at least are as attracted by our artificial manner as we are by their naturalness, whether real or depicted in poems, etc. (4 July 1822.)

  The goddesses, and especially Juno, are often called by Homer βοῶπις (βοώπιδος), [2547] that is, ox-eyed.1 The size of an ox’s eyes, which Homer is referring to, is certainly disproportionate to the face of man. Nonetheless the Greeks, who were great connoisseurs of beauty, were not afraid to use this exaggeration in praise of female beauty, and to attribute and appropriate this quality, as a quality of beauty, independent of the rest, and as containing beauty in itself, even though it contains a disproportion. And in fact not only are large eyes beautiful for all men and all women (if they do not, as many do, have barbarous taste) but even if their size is excessive, and noted as out of the ordinary, and striking, and rouses a sense of unfittingness, it’s not on that account unpleasing, and is not called ugliness. And observe that the same does not happen with other parts of the body that are supposed to be large (I omit the obscene, which belongs [2548] to other sources of pleasure, different from the beautiful). Neither the Greek poets nor any other poet or writer of good taste ever believed that exaggerating the size of those other parts was to praise them, and a quality of beauty, as they have done in relation to the eyes. From which you can deduce:

  (1) How true it is that the eyes are the most important part of the human appearance, and the more beautiful they are the more remarkable, and hence the more vivid. And that in them is truly depicted the life and soul of man (and of animals), and so the larger they are, the greater the soul and the vitality and the internal life of the animal really appears. (Nor is this appearance meaningless.) That’s why their size is pleasing even if disproportionate, because it indicates and demonstrates a greater quantity and measure of life. (2) How much [2549] of what is called human beauty and ugliness is independent of and extraneous to propriety, and hence the theory of beauty. For, as happens in this case, even what is disproportionate and beyond ordinary dimensions is pleasing because of man’s inclination to life, and is called beautiful. But the source of this beauty is not propriety but the above inclination and human quality that exists independently of propriety, and in spite of propriety, and hence of the true, proper, and precisely beautiful. (4 July 1822.)

  The question of whether suicide helps man or not (which is what knowing if it is reasonable or not, and can be chosen or not, comes down to) can be reduced to these simple terms. Which of the two is better, suffering or not suffering? As for pleasure, it is certain, [2550] immutable, and eternal that man in any condition of life, even if he is happy according to the common definition, cannot feel it, since, as I have shown elsewhere [→Z 532–35, 646–50], pleasure is always future, never present. And just as, consequently, each man can be physically certain of never feeling any pleasure in his life, so, too, each can be certain of not spending a day without suffering, and the majority of men can be certain of not spending a day without many serious sufferings, and some of not spending one without long-lasting and extremely serious sufferings (these are the so-called unhappy: poor, incurably ill, etc. etc.). Now I ask again, which is better, suffering or not suffering. Certainly enjoyment, and maybe also enjoyment and suffering, would be better than simply not suffering (since nature and self-love propel us and carry us so strongly toward enjoyment that enjoyment and suffering is more pleasant than not being and not suffering, and, by not being, being unable to enjoy), but since enjoyment is impossible for man, it remains necessarily and naturally [2551] excluded from the whole question. And we conclude that since not suffering is more helpful to man than suffering, and since he cannot live without suffering, it is mathematically true and certain that absolute not being is more beneficial and more fitting to man than being. And that being is, precisely, harmful to man. And therefore anyone who lives (if you take away religion) lives because of a pure formal error of calculation: I mean the calculation of utility. An error multiplied as many times as there are instants in
our life, in each of which we prefer living to not living. And we prefer it in fact no less than in intention, in desire, and in the mind’s more or less deliberate, more or less tacit and implicit discourse. An effect of self-love, deceived as in many other bad choices that it makes by thinking of them from the point of view of good, and the greatest good that is proper to it in those [2552] circumstances.

  That man will certainly not spend a day without suffering, which might appear a part of my argument not sufficiently proved, aside from the accidental ills and griefs that inevitably occur to all men, is also demonstrated by the same proposition that states that man can be certain of feeling no pleasure in his life. Because the absence, the lack, the negation of the pleasure that the living being tends toward, as to his highest and unique end, perpetually, and in every instant, by nature, by essence, by self-love inseparable from him, the negation, I mean, of pleasure, which is the perfection of life, is not a simple lack of enjoyment but is suffering (as I have demonstrated in the theory of pleasure). For man and [2553] the living creature cannot be deprived of the perfection of existence, and hence of happiness, without suffering, and without unhappiness. And between happiness and unhappiness there is no halfway state. That is the necessary, continuous, and perpetual goal of all acts, external and internal, and the whole life of the animal. Not obtaining it, the animal is unhappy; and this in each of those moments in which, desiring the said goal, that is, happiness without limit, as he always does, he does not obtain it and is deprived of it, as he always is. And so man can be physically certain that he will not spend, not just a day but an instant, without suffering. And all life is truly, by its own immutable nature, a fabric of necessary sufferings, and each instant that composes it is a suffering.

  Furthermore, man must be certain that in his life he will feel more or less, greater [2554] or lesser, but certainly painful and no small number of those accidental sufferings that are called ills, sorrows, misfortunes, or that result from man’s various desires, etc. And since he, on the other hand, can be very sure of spending his whole life without any pleasure, even if sufferings should make up in all the smallest part of his life (though it is certain that they will make up most of it), the question returns to its first terms, that is whether, if not suffering is better than suffering, and one cannot live without suffering, it is better to live or not to live. A single, even tiny sorrow, recognized as inevitable in life, without even a single, tiny pleasure to counterbalance it, is enough to make existing harmful to the one who exists, and not being preferable to being.1

  Since all this is applicable to [2555] all types of living creature in whatever their condition (none of them can be happy, hence must be unhappy, and suffer) and, besides, rests on principles and foundations as deep as they are certain, and immovable, and since it is meticulously reasoned and argued, and strictly logical, it serves to make known the destructive nature of simple reason, of metaphysics, and of dialectics, by virtue of which the whole living world should have perished by its own will and own deed, not long after its birth. (5 July 1822.)

  For p. 2529. As long as the youth preserves some tenderness toward himself, that is to say, loves himself with that keen and sensitive and susceptible love that is natural, and as long as he doesn’t throw himself away in the world, and think of himself almost, I would say, as though he were somebody else, he never does, nor can he do, anything but suffer, and never enjoys a moment of good or pleasure in the custom and accidents of social life. (6 July 1822.) To enjoy life, a state of despair is necessary.1

  [2556] Because the great use that the Italians (perhaps also the Spanish and the French) make of the constituent preposition di or dis in the negative sense (as in disamore, disfavorire [indifference, to oppose]; and by apocope in this and a thousand other cases, sfavorire, disutile [to be unfavorable to, useless], and a thousand others that can be formed at will: see the Crusca) is very minor and scarce in written Latin (as in dispar dissimilis discalceatus [unlike, dissimilar, shoeless], where the dis negates: see Forcellini under di), and because, on the other hand the said preposition has no meaning in Italian, French, or Spanish in itself (it seems to come from the Greek δὺς used as in δυσέρως, δυσωπία, δυστυχὴς [disastrously loving, shamefacedness, unlucky]), it appears to indicate that it was much more common in the vernacular than in written Latin, and that it took the place of the true negative particle, so frequent and useful in compounds, like the Greek privative α, and as the said particle is for us at the pleasure of the speaker or writer who needs [2557] some compound that says the opposite of what this or that other Italian root says. Furthermore the Latin dis in the words dissimilis and dispar has, in my view, a force that is more disjunctive than truly negative. And in discalceatus, discingo [shoeless, to ungird], etc., I think that it properly has more the force of the Greek ἀπὸ [from] in compounds (as here precisely ἀποζωννύω discingo [to ungird]) and of the Latin ex, also in compounds (is in excalceatus [without shoes], which is the same), than that which the true privative force of the Greek α holds for us, although discalceatus, etc., then came to have the privative meaning without shoes. And perhaps in this manner, that is, with the force of ἀπὸ and ex in compounds, the particle dis came to us, with the absolute meaning of privation or negation. But since we see, e.g., from the word discalceatus (and see Forcellini [2558] under Dis…) that the preposition made this passage among the ancient Latins, too, what I said in the beginning is proved, that is, that its negative or privative use, so frequent and familiar but not found in written Latin, must have come to us from Vulgar Latin. (9 July 1822.) See p. 2577.

  How remote men are from their true nature, and from the characteristics intended for their species, I observe also in the great physical difference that is encountered among men between one individual and another. I will leave out freaks, those defective, etc., from birth, or after birth, who are innumerable among men, and among any genus of animals barely one will be found for a thousand of ours, in proportion to how numerous the species is. I also completely exclude those among men who have developed physical imperfections, for accidental, visible causes, [2559] which, if not easy, are possible to avoid. I leave out the Ethiopians, the Americans who didn’t have beards, certain differences of structure in the Hottentots, the Patagonians (if there are any), the Lapps (who perhaps are born and live in a climate not intended by nature for the human species, as nature has denied this or that climate or land, etc., or all climates and lands, except for one, to many other species of animals, plants, etc.).1 All this can be regarded as differences of the various species among themselves, within a single genus, the way, e.g., the genus of dogs has very diverse species, diverse either in a single climate and country, or in different climates intended for one or another of those species, etc.

  But that in the same climate, in the same country, from the same two parents children so physically different are born, as happens among men, that [2560] of two fellow citizens, two brothers, one will be, e.g., extremely tall and have a very strong temperament, the other very weak and small; that this happens independently of any visible cause, either accidental or temporary; that it happens in spite of the very same upbringing and physical exercise; that it happens and is evidently determined from birth—I repeat, in what other species of animals is this found? Species, I say, and not genus, because, e.g., different species of dogs are very different in size but not so the individuals of each of those species in itself, not even if you take them from different families, different countries, different places, different climes.

  And stopping and limiting myself to the difference that exists between the physical proportions of individual humans, I say that the [2561] two poles of this difference are so far apart that no other species of animals, considered in the same circumstances of family, country, climate, etc., offers two individuals so different in size as individual humans are all the time, and especially if you take them from the two above-mentioned extremes.

  Certain
ly to each species of animal (and also plants, etc.) nature has assigned particular proportions, neither so narrow in range that one individual is precisely the same size as another, nor so broad that the characteristic size of the individuals of that species cannot be defined even loosely. Now, a naturalist, discussing any species of animal, will tell you its approximate size, and any individual of the species you see will correspond, or will [2562] diverge little from that, and in short the measure of size will always be a distinctive quality of that species of animal, and taking it as an approximation (the larger the size of the species in absolute terms, the greater the approximation) you will never be deceived. Let’s also suppose that you have seen only a single individual of a species, and that this is the extreme of either largeness or smallness of the species. Even if you form an idea of the size of the species based on that single individual, and later see others, you won’t be much deceived, or unreasonably far from your idea, nor will the difference in size (provided they are in fact of the same species) prevent you from recognizing them as individuals of that species, or make you doubt that they are. And this is the case even if they were the extreme opposites of the first individual you saw.

  [2563] All things considered, I find this thought not to be true, and so I leave it in the middle.1 The difference in physical proportions between individual humans seems to us greater than in other things, for reasons that I’ve given elsewhere [→Z 1194ff., 1306–307, 1589–90, 1793–94]. But in reality it’s not greater or relatively disproportionate, and likewise exists between other individual animals, in proportion to their greater or lesser specific size, always speaking, as is proper, approximately: although in those animals it doesn’t stand out and doesn’t seem so great to us. But by measuring one easily discovers that the said difference in animals is greater, and in men less than it seems to us. (9–10 July 1822.)