Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  [1254] To be able to contract a habit with ease is an essential quality and effect of great minds and carries with it, as a natural consequence and effect, a facility to undo already contracted habits with the help of new, easily acquired, contrary habits. Hence the capacity both for durability and for brevity in habits.1

  Consider those habits or disciplines which require a material exercise, e.g., of the hand, to be learned. Someone whose organs are better arranged, or generally more easily habituated, will manage to acquire that ability in a shorter time than others. That’s all there is to intelligence. Organs easily habituated, that is, flexible, adaptable, etc., either generally and in every respect—and this is intelligence capable of universality—or only or mainly in a certain way: this is the predisposition of intelligence to such and such a sphere, or its capacity to succeed chiefly in that sphere.

  Yet since internal organs are one thing and external organs quite another, so too a man of great intelligence will very often be wholly inept at acquiring mechanical abilities, that is, physical habituations, and vice versa.

  I in my meager intelligence have recognized no other difference from vulgar intellects than the ability [1255] to accustom it with ease to whatever I wished, and when I wished, and for it to contract a sturdy, well-rooted habit in not much time. So that if I read a poem, I easily become a poet; if I read a logician, a logician. If I am reading a thinker I acquire the habit of thinking straight away in the space of a day; if I am reading a particular style, I can imitate it immediately or very quickly, etc.;1 I can get the habit of a stylistic trait that seemed to me fitting in a short space of time, etc. etc. See p. 1312. The common people, who often intuit and through their metaphors express some great truths without knowing it, and some meanings that are proper rather than metaphoric even if intended to be the latter, call those who are slow learners—and the same word is used by the educated, and in writing, too—thickheads (i.e., organs not flexible and therefore difficult to habituate). Learning is simply becoming habituated.

  I believe that memory is nothing else but a habit contracted or to be contracted by organs, etc. A baby unable to contract a habit does not have memory, just as it has virtually no intellect nor reason, etc. And note that not only does it not have memory because only on few occasions could it have received some impression or other and gotten used to recalling it mentally, but it expressly lacks the faculty of memory. For no one remembers events from infancy, however much the impressions from that time may be the most intense of all and however many times a given impression may have been repeated in the child in infancy, more often indeed than is necessary for any impression or notion to persist in the memory of the full-grown man. This idea deserves to be developed at length and clarified. (1 July 1821.)

  [1256] If with respect to human beauty there are many points upon which either all or almost all men agree, this is not judgment, but sense-perception, inclination, etc. etc., and it has nothing to do with the abstract and metaphysical discourse of beauty. The women whom Homer calls βαθύκολποι [full-breasted] (Iliad 18, ll. 122, 339; 24, l. 215; Hymnus in Venerem 4, l. 258, with regard to the mountain nymphs)1 will seem to everyone to be more beautiful than their opposites. The reason is obvious, and does not really need saying. This is neither the ideal type of beauty, nor an innate idea, nor a judgment, a reason, etc.2 It will take children a long time before they are able to grasp that the attribute I have mentioned is beauty, and to make a distinction in beauteousness between one woman who has it, and another who lacks it. Nor is this true only of children. It also applies to young people who are inexperienced and do not know much about certain things, however much they are used to seeing, young people with just a modest upbringing, etc., and I call here on the testimony many have given. Women will be somewhat slower to grasp this point, and for a long time will not conceive either a judgment upon, or a sensation of, a difference in beauty between two women, etc. See p. 1315, end.

  And nevertheless this attribute to which I refer [1257] very swiftly enters into ideal beauty, and the poet (like, indeed, Homer), or the painter who draws the idea of a beauty to be represented from his own mind (as Raphael says that he used to do),1 will certainly not fail to conceive the idea of a girl or a woman who is βαθύκολπος [full-breasted]. And yet the origin of this idea will be something quite different from a type of beauty, or an innate, universal judgment or form of beauty imprinted by nature in the mind of man. So easy is it to deceive oneself when judging the ideas man has regarding what is purportedly the absolutely beautiful. See p. 1339. I argue similarly about other similar external attributes of man or woman.

  Likewise with the brilliance of the eyes, or with any expression of the soul that appears in the countenance, which, however, even when everyone is agreed that it is beauty, not everyone agrees that it is to be preferred to languor, or even to silliness, etc. Nor do I know if the English women who are compared to sylphs and whom many judge so beautiful and preferable, etc., belong to the company of those represented by Homer in the passages cited.

  And I would note, as a point obvious through experience, that women (even before being susceptible to envy on account of beauty) are much slower than men to form a precise and distinct judgment regarding the outward forms of their own sex and never attain the perfection of judgment and taste that men achieve. And vice versa discuss men as regards their own sex. I mean, of course, where there is parity of circumstances. I’m not out to compare, for example, a deeply thoughtful, etc. etc., woman to a man who is sluggish and has little or no sensitivity, etc. Since in such a case, everyone understands that such a [1258] woman will very probably be a better judge of the forms of her own sex than such a man. (1 July 1821.)

  Observe the very different and often completely opposite judgments of different nations or provinces and different times, and of the same nation or province at different times, about the beauty and grace of the bearing of different classes of people, their manner of standing, moving, sitting, gesturing, presenting themselves, etc., and about good manners as well, except for those which are determined and prescribed by reason and common sense. Things about which we can say that there is no manner judged to be very beautiful, graceful, and seemly in one place and time which in another place and time is not, has not been, or is not going to be judged very ugly, unseemly, rude, etc. What is certain, where the beauty of man’s bearing is concerned, is that no one can establish any rule, any theory, any norm, any absolute model. I am not speaking about modes of dress, respecting the beauty of which, and of men in relation to it, judgment varies according to places and times, indeed, according to territories and moments, without even any dependence on constant and [1259] universal nature. (1 July 1821.) See p. 1318, end.

  Often when we see a building, a church, or some object of art, we are at first struck by a lack, an excess, an inequality, a disorder or irregularity in symmetry, etc. But no sooner have we become aware of or understood the reason for this disorder, and how it was done deliberately, or not by chance, nor through negligence, but for usefulness, comfort, out of necessity, etc., not only do we not judge, but we no longer sense any disproportion in the object such as we conceived, felt, and judged originally. Is the idea of definite proportions and disproportions not, therefore, relative and mutable? And why at that first moment did we feel and form the judgment that there was disproportion or something wrong? Because of habituation, which has in us the natural property of causing us to judge one thing on the basis of another, one individual, one species, one genus on the basis of another, and hence one convention on the basis of another. From which stems the universal error of positing not only absolute beauty but also absolute truth, of measuring all our fellows in terms of ourselves, of positing absolute perfection, of believing that all beings are to be judged in terms of a single norm, and from this the error of believing ourselves to be more perfect than any other [1260] kind of being. But there is no comparative perfection outside a single kind, only between individual
s, etc. (1 July 1821.)

  One can, however, admit a comparative perfection between different kinds of thing, within the system of a given nature or universal mode of existing. But it is a fairly broad comparative perfection, far less narrow and precise than any man and living being naturally imagines, and one that is never absolute, because it could not be absolute save with regard to the entire and universal system of all possibilities. This thought needs to be pondered, developed, expanded, and clarified. (1 July 1821.)

  To what I have said elsewhere [→Z 461–62] about the impossibility of doing a thing well if it is done with too much care, one can add what Alfieri says in his Life about the mad attention he paid to all the minutiae in his first readings and studies of the Classics,1 and what we experience, e.g., in the study of languages. Where you may note that at the beginning, on account of the extreme attention you pay to every last detail, when reading in a specific language, the writers always prove to be (more or less) difficult. Whereas very often, if you happen to [1261] have neglected the study of that language for a period of time, and lost the habit of paying such close attention, then, when you start reading a few pages in it again and are expecting to encounter greater difficulty because of the exercise being interrupted, you find you are much quicker than before. So too, even if you have not neglected it, but simply started reading something in the language not for the purpose of study or exercise, but merely to pass the time, or to amuse yourself, or in some way or other in a frame of mind that is to a greater or lesser degree relaxed. Likewise, when we have learned or think we have learned the language, when we no longer read as students, but casually and just as readers. We may then encounter greater difficulties than when we had been reading for the purposes of study, but we do not attach any great importance to them, nor do they impede us or hold us back to any great extent, nor do they prevent a ready facility. In short, one never gets to read a new language fluently until one sets aside one’s purpose as a student in order to assume that of a reader, and so long as that first phase endures, and solely on account of it, and even without any real difficulty, [1262] obstacles are always to be found, that another person will not find in the same circumstances, and possessing the same skill, but having a different frame of mind. (1–2 July 1821.) Thus, we do not find pleasure or ease in the simple act of reading, even in our own language, when we read too studiously, etc.1

  To what I have said elsewhere [→Z 601–602] about the impossibility of forming any idea beyond matter, and beyond the material name imposed on spirit itself and the soul, add that we cannot conceive of any affect in our mind other than in the guise of material forms or resemblances, nor make it understood except by way of metaphors drawn from matter (although sometimes with the passage of time they have lost the proper and original meaning and retained the metaphoric one), such as to inflame, comfort, move, touch, harden, sweeten, soften, pain, lift the mind, etc. etc. And not only affects but neither can we conceive of accidents except in this way, whether they be produced by external factors, or by the direct action of external objects, as with to constrain, and some of the others mentioned above, etc. (2 July 1821.) See p. 1388, beginning.

  Whole years pass without our experiencing an intense pleasure, indeed even a momentary sensation of pleasure. Not a day goes by without a child doing so. What is the cause? It is because there is science in us and ignorance in him. It is true, vice versa, that the same applies to pain. (2 July 1821.)

  [1263] For p. 1207, margin. These differences can be found at every step within a single nation, in accordance with the dialects, etc. And we should again note how habituation and use causes us to regard as natural, beautiful, etc., a word that, if it is new or unfamiliar to us, will strike us as very ugly, misshapen, unseemly in itself, and, so far as the language is concerned, monstrous, very hard, very harsh, and barbarous. E.g., if I were to say precization, I would be met with howls of laughter.1 Why exactly? It is not the nature of the word but because we are not used to hearing it. Thus it is that barbarous words become good through use, thus languages change and present-day Italians speak in a manner that would have disgusted their ancestors, and thus use is acknowledged to be the sovereign lord of spoken languages, etc. (2 July 1821.)

  For p. 1134. The study of etymologies pursued through studies in depth of archaeology,2 on the one hand, and philosophy on the other, leads us to believe that all or almost all the ancient languages of the world (and through them the modern languages also) derived in the very earliest times, in the fog, indeed the darkness of time, directly or indirectly from just one, or from very few absolutely original languages, the mothers of so many and so very different daughters. This very first language, or so it seems, when it spread across the various parts of the globe, through the migrations of men, was still very crude, very meager. It lacked any kind of inflection, it was highly imprecise and obliged to signify a hundred things with [1264] just one sign; it lacked any rules and the slightest trace of grammar, etc., and was very probably not yet adapted to any mode of writing. (If so-called hieroglyphic writing, or its precursors, were already in use, they have nothing to do with language, for they represent not the word but the thing, and are a different order of signs, perhaps prior to speech itself, certainly prior, in my opinion, to any speech that was to any extent developed and mature.) Nor should it be a cause for wonder that the great work of language—a work that dumbfounds the philosopher who thinks about it, as to a still greater degree does the work of representing the words, and each sound of each word, called a letter, by means of writing, and of reducing all human sounds to a very restricted number of signs called an alphabet—should have made exceedingly slow progress and only managed to attain a degree of maturity after very many centuries, notwithstanding the fact that man had long since adopted the social state. As for the alphabet or writing, it seems certain that it came long after the dispersal of mankind, for it is known that many already developed nations took their alphabet from other foreign nations, as the Greeks did from the Phoenicians, the Romans from etc. It was therefore not known of before they dispersed and divided, since at the beginning they did not have any alphabet. And the Phoenicians had one because of their extensive commerce, etc. Therefore, if commerce existed, the nations were, and had long been, divided.

  So, as mankind spread across the globe and brought to every region the very meager and feeble conventions of signifying sound that then constituted language, it came to settle in the various regions, and society very slowly began to grow and to advance toward perfection. The adequacy and organization of language is thus, on the one hand, the first and necessary means of this advance, and, on the other, its consequence. So [1265] language grew slowly and in step with society, all the time on the basis or root of those first conventions, that is, those first words of which it was composed. The latter were uniform everywhere, but the fully constituted forms of language could not be uniform, nor could the unity of language among men be preserved. First, since the constitution of language depended in the main on whim or chance and on convention that was either arbitrary or accidental, whims and accidents could not be the same in the very diverse societies established in the very diverse parts of the globe, even if they had all retained the same customs, the same opinions, the same features of the original and very restricted society from which they derived, and even if, moreover, all parts of the globe had the same climate and influenced their inhabitants in every respect in a wholly uniform way.

  Second, when mankind divided and scattered through the world it became infinitely diversified in its various parts, not only as regards all the other appurtenances of human life and character, etc., but also as regards pronunciation, the attributes of articulated sounds and of spoken alphabets, which differ markedly on account of climate, etc. etc., as we can see. The countless [1266] differences affecting mankind, which was already divided into nations and scattered across the various regions of the earth, meant that the constitution of languages among the original nations was utte
rly different, even though they all derived from the same root, and retained within themselves the few, primitive, elements drawn from their first mother, variously altered through the replacement of letters, according to the disposition of the organs of each population, through inflections, through meanings especially, through the forming of compounds, derivatives, and countless, very different, metaphors, such as man naturally uses to signify new things or those as yet unnamed, etc. etc.

  Third, the original language must without fail have made use of the same words in order to signify very different things, since roots were scarce and the language had no or few inflections, derivatives, compounds, etc. The Hebrew language, one of the most unrefined of the written languages, and a very ancient language, too, may serve as concrete proof of what I am saying, and of what is sufficiently clear from the nature of things. Now, as their languages developed, and as the various peoples found a manner, in one way or another, of signifying things more distinctly, they kept for their first radical words sometimes one [1267] sometimes another of the meanings that the words had originally, whether such meanings were proper or metaphoric. It should thus not be a cause for wonder if we very often find, in very different languages, such and such roots, which are identical or similar sounding, but very disparate in meaning. Nor is disparity in meaning a sufficient reason for deciding that there is no affinity between them. One needs the wisdom and subtlety of the philosopher, and the vast erudition and expertise of the philologist, the archaeologist, and the polyglot in order to examine if and how some such root could in the beginning combine those two or more, diverse, meanings. Who does not see that, e.g., the English and German word wolf is the same as volpes or vulpes [fox], which means another quadruped that is likewise wild and harmful to men? Meanwhile, this observation demonstrates the huge difference that was bound gradually to arise between the various languages, and the limitless occultation of the original language, once common to all but already no longer intelligible nor recognizable, that was bound to ensue. (See p. 2007, beginning.)