Why Zibaldone

I

Curiosity and Desire

As he read his way voraciously through ancient and modern literature, Leopardi developed a philosophical understanding of human life and civilization that ranks as one of the most profound, and profoundly disquieting, of modern times…But the laboratory of Leopardi’s mature thought was the notebook he began to keep in 1817, when he was nineteen years old…By the end of 1823, the notebook was mostly complete…The last entry is dated 1832, and he died in 1837…But the notebook itself remained unpublished until 1898, when it appeared in Italian under the name Zibaldone—that is, “miscellany” or “hodgepodge.” (Adam Kirsch at New Republic)

Zibaldone consists of Leopardi's notebooks—never intended for publication—with impressions, observations, reflections, and aphorisms on all aspects of culture, society, and the human condition…Consulting Italian dictionaries reveals that the term “zibaldone,” meaning a miscellany or hodgepodge, initially in the pejorative sense of a disorderly or disorganized heap of ideas or writings, is believed to be culinary in origin. (Jamie Richards at Asymptote)

The frail and sickly poet was also a thinker of intrepid bravery who produced one of the most unsparing critiques of modern ideals. Crucially, this was the work of a quintessentially modern mind – one that looked to the bottom of modern civilisation and found there nothing but conceit and illusion. (John Gray at New Statesman) 

[Leopardi’s] such freakish learning often does [is] by the time he reached age 20, Leopardi’s health was already precarious—his eyesight was deteriorating, he complained of limb-pain, and he was developing a hunched back that his family believed was caused by all those hours crouched over manuscripts in the family library…The hundreds and hundreds of entries are almost all dated with extreme precision, as their author worked his way through library volumes, borrowed books, treatises, and periodicals, constantly scratching. In 1832, almost overnight, the gushing stops. Leopardi, we’re told, “keeps it by him, for the rest of his life, and it will remain in the possession of his companion Antonio Ranieri until the latter’s death in 1888. Strangely, the reader of Leopardi suddenly feels bereft.” Suddenly bereft, after 4,526 pages. Madness. (Steve Donoghue at The Quarterly Conversation)

[T]he original manuscript was 4,526 pages long and it is, to say the least, pretty dense stuff. “Zibaldone” means “mishmash” or “jumble” and the work is so enormous that even the editors describe it as “unique, infinite, almost monstrous (Tobias Jones at The Sunday Times) 

Here Giacomo – the prodigiously gifted but sickly son of Count Monaldo Leopardi – spent his youth and early adulthood poring over books in many languages, ancient and modern, in his father’s immense library, one of the largest private libraries in Europe. Friendless, starved for affection, forbidden to leave the family castle without his tutor, Giacomo developed a large hunch in his back and by 21 gave up any hope of personal happiness...The reader of the Zibaldone often gets a sense that Leopardi is addressing him or her directly, yet in truth, when a thinker is in dialogue with himself, he is in dialogue with the world at large. (Robert Pogue Harrison at Financial Times)

The one work of Leopardi’s that I have always wanted to be able to read and previously could not in English is this: his Zibaldone, or hodge-podge notebooks. It is of all possible translations the one I have most keenly awaited...[R]eading him is life-enhancing, nonetheless. Let Leopardi himself explain that: “It is a property of works of genius that, even when they represent vividly the nothingness of things, even when they clearly show and make you feel the inevitable unhappiness of life, even when they express the most terrible despair, nevertheless to a great soul that finds itself in a state of extreme dejection, disenchantment, nothingness, boredom and discouragement about life, or in the most bitter and deathly misfortune, such works always bring consolation, and rekindle enthusiasm, and, though they treat and represent nothing but death, they restore, albeit momentarily, the life that it had lost.” (Evening Standard) 

A central point in Leopardi's reflections, from the very beginning, is that all living beings live for pleasure. They all want to be happy. For Leopardi, to live means this desire for happiness and wellbeing. There is no ideology, no historical or political schema that can make us forget this very simple truth. The problem is that life as it is, the nature of things as they are, do not allow us to be happy because we are fragile, subject to mortality, illness, weather, natural catastrophes, lack of resources, famines, moral evil, other people's violence, etc. This is at the core of Leopardi's theory of pleasure in Zibaldone, where he tries to find a solution to this fundamental contradiction. (Franco D'Intino, translator)

II

Realism and the Present

[The first premise] for a serious inquiry into any event or “thing,” we need realism.

By realism I refer to the urgent necessity not to give a more important role to a scheme already in our minds, but rather to cultivate an entire, passionate, insistent ability to observe the real event, the fact. Saint Augustine, with a cautious play of words, affirms something similar with this declaration: “I inquire in order to know something, not to think it.”

[F]or the religious experience, it is important, primarily, to know what it is, what exactly we are dealing with. It is clear, in any case, that, above all, we are dealing with a fact, from a statistical standpoint the most widespread aspect of human activity…The question of religious awareness, of the religious sense—as we shall see—is: “What is the meaning of everything?”… Thus, because we wish to know what this fact is, of what this religious sense consists, the problem of method concerns us immediately and acutely. How shall we face this phenomenon to ensure that we will succeed in knowing it well?

We must note here that most people, when it comes to this, either consciously or unconsciously, trust the words of others, especially those with prestigious or influential positions—philosophers whom we have studied in school or journalists who write in the newspapers or magazines that determine and form public opinion. Shall we turn to these individuals to discover what this religious sense is? Shall we study what Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Marx, or Engels say about it? We could do this, but, as a first step, the method would be incorrect. When we deal with this fundamental expression of man’s existence, we simply cannot abandon ourselves to the opinions of others, absorbing the most fashionable views or impressions that determine our milieu.

Realism requires a certain method for observing and coming to know an object, and this method must not be imagined, thought of or organized and created by the subject: it must be imposed by the object…This means that the method of knowing an object is dictated by the object itself and cannot be defined by me. If […] we suppose that our eyes could perceive the religious experience as a phenomenon, even in this case, we would have to say that the method for knowing it must be suggested by the religious experience itself.

What type of phenomenon is the religious experience? It is a phenomenon that concerns human reality and therefore cannot be studied as a geological or meteorological event. It involves the person. How then must we conduct our inquiry? Since we are dealing with something that occurs within me, that has to do with my conscience, my “I” as a person, it is on myself that I must reflect; I must inquire into myself, engage in an existential inquiry.

Once I have undertaken this existential investigation, I can usefully compare my results with the views of thinkers and philosophers on this matter. At this point, my self-examination will be enriched by such a comparison, and I will have avoided raising another person’s opinion to the level of definition. If I did not begin with this existential inquiry, it would be like asking someone else to define a phenomenon that I experience. This external consultation must confirm, enrich, or contest the fruits of my own personal reflection. Otherwise, I would be substituting the opinion of others for a task that belongs to me, and, in the end, I would form an inevitably alienating opinion.

* * * * *

Starting from the present is inevitable. In order to deepen our outlook of the past—whether it be the near or distant past—from which point do we start? From the present. In order to venture into risky visions of the future, what is the starting point? The present…The present is, in fact, the place, both splendid and enigmatic, of freedom, the energy which manipulates the content of the past, thereby unleashing a responsible creativity. As we have said, in order to understand the factors which constitute him, man must start from the present, not the past. To begin from the past in order to come to know man’s present would be a grave error in perspective. For example, if, before an inquiry into my religious experience…[i]t is only when faced with the knowledge of my present that it is possible for me to take into account my objective structure as a human being with its natural elements and dynamic, which are thus also identifiable in the past.

If I grasp now the factors of my experience as a human being, then I can project myself into the past and recognize the same perceptible factors in the pages of Homer, or among the Eleatic philosophers, or Plato, Virgil, or Dante. This will confirm the great unity of the human family and will really become for me an experience of civilization which grows and is enriched as time passes. (Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense)

III

The "I" and Correspondence

This stress on the value of the ‘I’ has been not just the reason for a deeper reflection, for a development of religiosity as a fundamental category of the ‘I,’ but also the fascinating origin of the relationship with all levels of knowledge, the origin of a reading of human experience as that found in the most astute people, who are more gifted with this sensitivity—the poets and the whole of human expressiveness. So you see why I am fascinated with Leopardi: he was the writer, the expression that I had studied most (I had learned almost all his poetry by heart), in whom I grasped the fundamental question.

When I was thirteen, I memorized the entire poetic production of Leopardi, because the issue he raised seemed to me to obscure all the others. For an entire month I studied only Leopardi.

* * * * *

This is the process by which faith occurs in me, in you, and in everyone—thanks to the grace of God, of course. It is the faith that the great “friend” of my early years, Giacomo Leopardi—the one poet all my friends and I had read—lacked. I remember I was in junior high school when I had my first intuition of all these things. The teacher didn’t explain them to me; I understood them as I read Leopardi’s poem “Alla sua donna” (To His Lady). This is a lofty ode to beauty, not the beauty of this or that particular mistress (of all the women he loved), but Beauty with a capital “B”…Reading this poem (it was May and I was in eighth grade), I knew that Leopardi had intuited the need for Beauty. […]

What!? An “unknown lover” of Beauty, who is present among us?! Beauty had become flesh and yet was unknown to us. Beauty had not disdained to come down to earth and wear this mortal flesh; she lived and lives among us and yet we are far from her. Finally, I said to myself, “This is the first chapter of the Gospel of Saint John: ‘And the Word became flesh’” (John 1:14).

This was the turning point in my cultural life. I use “culture” in its broad meaning as including both faith and reason. I had more or less figured out what I outlined above, that more than any other hypothesis of meaning, it is faith that answers the needs of the human heart, and therefore faith is more rational than any other rational hypothesis.

So, we propose faith as the highest form of rationality because the encounter with an event that carries it brings about an experience and a correspondence to what is human that would otherwise be unthinkable.

My eighth-grade intuition was confirmed several years later when I read Giulio Augusto Levi’s study of Leopardi. Imagine my surprise when I read that this eminent literary critic was treating the poem “To His Lady” as the apex of the poet's journey from which he slipped into the nihilism of “La ginestra” (The Broom or the Flower of the Desert). According to Levi, the great poet was unable to resist falling into despair because he had no one, no friends or companions, to challenge him and support him in taking the tiny step that he should have made—that is, a comparison with the first chapter of the Gospel of Saint John. What Leopardi longed for in his youth, the beauty that he hoped to find in the streets of this world, has really happened; it is the Christian message. The leading critic of the time supported this interpretation.

Some time ago, a friend of mine had the idea of interviewing the last living descendant of Leopardi, who told him that she refused to meet with any more critics or reporters because no one understood the poet. For this reason, she said regretfully that she could not receive my friend. As she was saying this, my friend stopped her and said, “Look, I have read Giulio Augusto Levi.” She stopped, abruptly turned around, and said, “What are you saying? You are so young and you have read Levi? This is the first time I’ve heard him mentioned: you must understand that he alone interpreted Leopardi correctly on that point!”

* * * * *

What Leopardi dreamed, that this eternal idea of Beauty should assume material form, became an event in history. (Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education)