Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  A portrait, even a very good likeness, gives us a thoroughly ordinary pleasure if we do not know the person, but an extraordinary one if we do know them. Apply this observation to objects the poet and artist chooses to imitate, condemning the Romantics and the majority of foreign poets who choose for preference foreign and unknown objects upon which to exercise their powers of imitation. (9 July 1821.)

  Another proof that we are more prone to fear than hope lies in our seeing that for the most part we easily believe what we fear, and with difficulty what we desire, even when it is far more probable. And given two people, one who fears and the other who desires one and the same thing, the former will believe it and the latter will not. And if we go from fearing a thing to desiring it, we no longer know how to believe what previously we did not know how not to believe, [1304] as has happened to me many times. And faced with two things, either contrary or dissimilar, one desired and the other feared, and that have the same basis for belief, our belief opts for the latter and shuns the former. In examining the foundations of some propositions that from the beginning I feared were true, and then desired them to be so, I found them in the beginning to be very convincing, and then quite inadequate. (10 July 1821.)

  To what I said about popular language a few thoughts ago, add the following. Popular language is rich, and a major source of very beautiful words and phrases, not really for the written language, but specifically for the writer. Which means that when the writer draws on it, he must ennoble those words and phrases, shape them, adjust them in such a fashion that they do not sound discordant, nor seem too different from the others that art has introduced into writing, and has polished, and, in short, that they do not sit ill with the nature of artificial and elegant writing. He must not transfer them wholesale from the mouth of the people to writing, if they are not already wholly suited to it in themselves, or if the writing is not in a banal, humorous, or very homely genre, etc. So that I [1305] hold that popular language is a great source of novelties, etc., for the writer, in the same way as mother tongues, etc., which provide a great quantity of material, but it is up to the writer to shape it, work it, and adapt it to suit his needs, and not simply to transpose it wholesale or employ it just as found. (10 July 1821.)

  An isolated man would naturally believe, in a confused way at least, that the world was made for him alone. And therefore he believes that it is made for his whole species, inasmuch as he knows that species well, and lives in its midst, and reasons easily and simply about the information that society and ordinary knowledge puts before him. But because by the same token he cannot live in the society of all the other creatures, his reason stops here, and in the absence of reflections that cannot be common to many he does not come to know that the world is made for all the creatures of which it is composed. I have seen men who have lived long in the world, and then become solitary, and having always been selfish, believe in good faith that the world was more or less wholly for them, which belief transpired in their deeds of every kind, and even implicitly in what they said. And not only [1306] were they quite unable to suffer or to want for anything, but they could barely conceive how it was that men and things did not always and altogether lend themselves to their convenience, and they would manifest their wonder at this fact and their indignation in the most singular fashion, and sometimes in a manner hard to credit in people accustomed to being well-mannered and to understanding the sacrifices society requires, matters in which they still took great pride. But in acting in this way, they were not aware of failing in any debt they might owe to others, nor of exacting more than was their due, etc. (10 July 1821.)

  Wherever utility is involved, we do not consider, conceive, or feel proportion and propriety except in terms of what is useful. Suppose we take a sword with a large hilt, which is for the convenience and defense of the hand. What proportion can there be between the large head and the slender body? And yet to us it seems utterly proper and well-proportioned. Why? First, because of habituation, the principal cause and norm of the sentiment we have of proportion, propriety, beauty, and ugliness. Second, because we know its purpose and utility, and this knowledge determines our idea regarding the proportion, etc., of the object we see. Someone who had never seen a sword, and did not know its [1307] function, or that of the hilt, etc., might well judge it to be very ill-proportioned and feel it to be ugly relative to the other objects that he knows and to the other proportions he has in mind. The same goes for human forms, etc. Is it not then true that proportion is relative? What type, what universal form can an idea have when it is individually determined by knowledge of a specific object, its parts, their purposes, etc., when it is determined by the habit of seeing it, etc., a habit which varies not only according to the countless differences between objects, but also according to the differences between these concepts, habits, etc.? And how can an idea that derives from special knowledge of each thing and part, and from special habituation, be innate, how can it have a common, stable norm, one determined primordially and abstractly by the absolute nature of the whole? (10 July 1821.)

  If I may be permitted an observation regarding a trifling matter that might seem ridiculous to spell out, and hardly deserving of being written down. There are some really minute parts of the human body that man is only able to observe with difficulty, very rarely, and only by chance, in others, and which he is only used to observing in himself. In himself, and on the basis of how they are in him he conceives the idea of what [1308] they ought to be, and of the propriety of their forms and proportions, etc., and of all their accidents. For example, the nails of the hand. They may only very rarely be observed in others, yet often in oneself. Now what follows from this? What follows is that all of us form the idea of the beauty of this part of our body from the shape it has in each one of us. And because this idea is modeled upon a single individual of the species, and habituation is wholly individual to its subject, if, therefore, it so happens that we sometimes observe or pay fleeting attention to that same part in others, it will be rare indeed that it does not seem to us to be strangely shaped, and does not instill in us a particular sense of deformity or infirmity, etc., of ugliness, and even of revulsion, because it contrasts with the habit that we have entered into. And if we chance to observe that part in the most handsome person in the world, but one who in this regard differs markedly from ourselves, it will strike us as markedly defective in that person, even when it strikes others, or people in general, as just the opposite in different circumstances. In short, the judgment that we form as to the beauty or ugliness of that part in others is always in proportion to the greater or lesser conformity it has not with general, and to us unknown circumstances, but with our own particular circumstances.

  Add that other ideas of human beauty, since they are formed on the basis of our knowledge, and habituation, and observation of [1309] many different individuals, are never unique, and one will strike us as beautiful and another as beautiful also, though it be very different. (This selfsame multiplicity in ideas of human beauty will be in proportion to the seeing and observing that has been done, etc. etc. etc.) But in our own case, because the idea is formed on the basis of a single subject, and of an individual habituation and observation, it is for that reason unique, and not only that which is not similar to, but also that which is not uniform with that subject strikes us as ugly or as proportionately less beautiful. See p. 1311, paragraph 2.

  One has to modify the above observations according to the accidents and circumstances that anyone may readily conceive. E.g., if an illness or some other accident has deformed your nails, you feel this deformity, because it clashes with your previous habituation, and then (at any rate until you come to be habituated to the new form) you will not measure others in terms of how you are but rather of how you were previously. If one of your nails is deformed, even from birth, etc., you will easily realize it by comparing it with your others. If you have always been absolutely deformed in this part of the human body, that is to say, very
different from [1310] others, it then follows that the little that you may accidentally be able to observe of the usual forms, albeit in general and not in detail, might well suffice to make you apprehend your own deformity, because, since the difference is great, it will be quite noteworthy, and those parts in other persons will also be obvious to you, more than they would be in other circumstances, and thus the habit that you form will contrast with what you see in yourself. You will have much more difficulty, however, in perceiving this deformity, and feel it somewhat less than you would if it were in another. So it is with far greater deformities, whether our own or of people we live with, etc., and see p. 1212, paragraph 2.

  These observations are trifling, yet it is only by unraveling, investigating, unmasking, pondering, and observing trivial matters, and by resolving what are actually great matters into their trivial parts that a philosopher arrives at great truths. And I, on the one hand, do not believe that one could adduce a more certain proof than these observations in order to demonstrate how the judgment, sense, and idea of the beauty or ugliness of the forms of our fellow beings (a judgment, and a sense influenced more by universal nature than by anything else) depends upon habituation and observation, and except for certain natural inclinations, has absolutely no other cause, rule, or exemplar. [1311] On the other hand, I do not see what other truer and more irrefutable proposition could be demonstrated in a more palpable fashion.

  Discuss the other parts of the human body in the same way, whether they are equally minute or equally difficult to see and observe in others, or in more than a few. (10 July 1821.) See below.

  For p. 1309. All the more so because the observation we have made in ourselves of these parts is very meticulous, and therefore the idea that we have of their appropriate shape, etc., is very exact and well defined, more so perhaps than any other idea. And this indeed because it is modeled upon ourselves, that is to say, upon an exemplar which is naturally better known to us, more precisely observed, and more frequently, indeed, continuously seen than any other physical object. (10 July 1821.)

  For the above thought. I do not wish to press this argument toward what is indecent, and perhaps of necessity and unwillingly, I have already taken it too far. I will be brief. Of those human parts that someone is not acquainted with, or at that time of life when no one is acquainted with them, not only does he not have any idea of the beautiful or the ugly, and in wishing to form it very probably deceives himself, but [1312] if he wishes to conjecture as to their universal properties, forms, and proportions, he cannot guess, unless perhaps by chance. And the child does indeed distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly among men, and does not yet wholly know, not only beauty, but even the human form, and the one he does know does not give him a sufficient idea either of the properties or the proportions or the fittingness of what he does not know. And see in this regard p. 1184, margin. (12 July 1821.)

  For p. 1255, margin. —and become mature, practiced, etc., e.g., in a style, after just the one reading, that is, with very little practice, etc. This propensity for habituation, a mark and consequence of talent, I noticed in myself even in the fine details, as in the habituation to various routines, and in my easily dishabituating myself from them by means of a new habituation, etc. etc. In short, I soon regarded myself as trained in any matter at all even if it was very new to me. (12 July 1821.)

  For p. 1226, margin, end. If we were to examine closely what elegance in words, phrases, expressions, and style consists in, we would see how often, indeed, always, it consists in the indefinite (see in this regard what I have said elsewhere [→Z 61] about a passage in Horace) see p. 1337, beginning, or in something irregular, that is to say, in qualities which are the reverse of those chiefly cultivated in didactic or doctrinal writing. I do not deny that such writing is susceptible to elegance, especially in those parts in which elegance does not harm precision, that is to say, especially in forms and expressions. And there is a splendid [1313] example of this association of precision with elegance in the style of Celsus and, among our own writers, in the style of Galileo. Simplicity is especially fitting, moreover, in a didactic writer (and is particularly admired in the first of these writers), and is a quality which, within the bounds of propriety, is always elegance, because it is always naturalness. Indeed, I hold that philosophy and the sciences, which are works of man, can bend and accommodate themselves to literature and poetry, which are works of nature, rather than the other way around. And therefore I have said [→Z 1228–29, 1231] that where philosophy reigns, there poetry cannot be found. It is right that poetry, wherever it may be, should reign, and should not adapt, because nature, which is its source, does not vary with the times, nor with the customs or notions of men, as the kingdom of reason varies. (13 July 1821.)

  Anyone wishing to be convinced of the huge multiplicity of styles and almost distinct languages contained within the Italian language should consider the works of Daniello Bartoli, for “no one was better acquainted with the recondite secrets of our language.” (Monti, Proposta, vol. 1, paragraph 1, p. XIII.) [1314] An expert in the study of our language, when for the first time he happens to read this writer, remains dumbfounded and alarmed, and whereas he used to reckon himself to be at the end of the road so far as such studies are concerned, he begins to believe that he is scarcely halfway. And I speak from experience when I say that the act of reading Bartoli, which I have done after a fair acquaintance with Italian writers of every kind and every style, leads one to despair of ever fully knowing the power and infinite variety of the forms and aspects the Italian language may assume. You find yourself in a new language. Expressions, words, and forms whose existence you had never suspected, although you now acknowledge them to be utterly beautiful and Italian. Efficacy and clarity of expression such as to put even Dante to shame at times, not only surpassing the power of any other writer ancient or modern, but also correcting the prevailing opinion regarding the potential resources of the language. And all of this novelty is not a novelty which cannot be understood, for that would not be a virtue but a supreme vice, and would shame, not the reader, but the writer. Everything can be understood very well indeed, and everything is new, and out of the ordinary. [1315] It is an utterly Italian language and style, and yet it is a wholly different language and style, and the reader marvels at his fully understanding, and thoroughly enjoying a language that he has never heard, or at speaking a language that is expressed in a fashion unknown to him and yet well understood. Such is the immensity and variety of the Italian language, a faculty that few even of the Italians most versed in their own tongue notice and feel, a faculty that foreigners only with difficulty will ever be able fully to know, and hence to acknowledge. (13 July 1821.)

  The successive changes in the dispositions of each man’s mind, as he grows older, provide an accurate and unwavering image of the changes of the human generations over the course of the centuries. (And, likewise, vice versa.) Except for the fact that they are disproportionately rapid, especially today,1 because a young man at the age of twenty-five no longer retains any resemblance whatsoever to ancient times or qualities, opinions, dispositions, inclinations, such as imagination, virtue, etc. etc. etc. (13 July 1821.)

  For p. 1256, end. And so true is it that the idea of this particular beauty does not derive from type, etc., but from natural inclination and from sensation, wholly independent of the sphere of beauty and propriety, [1316] that the inclination which Aristophanes called an inclination “πρὸς κρέας μέγα” [“for a good bit of flesh”] (see at all costs Ménage, on Laertius, Polemo, 4, 19)1 causes the lustful to see as beautiful and to desire a βαθυκολπία [full-breastedness]2 that is excessive and much greater than is usual or commonly found in nature, and hence not beautiful. Apply this observation to all the other ideas that the “λίχνος πόρνης ἐπαγαλλόμενος πυγῇσιν” [“lecher who enjoys a whore’s buttocks”] has of female beauty (Crates of Thebes, the Cynic, in Laertius, Crates the Theban, 6, 8
5, see Ménage there).3 Ideas differing from ones that are more fixed and general, which are, however, no less ingrained and perceptible in those who in other contexts do not recognize and are not affected by female beauty. (13 July 1821.)

  Our language has, it may be said, examples of every style, and of the way in which they can be used in every genre of writing except for the modern, precise philosophical genre. Why do we suppose it lacks and must lack the latter, against its nature, which is to be suited to every style, and so to this one, too? But in truth, though the outcome may be certain, the test of using good Italian in this genre has never been tried, except with some of the scientific genres [1317] in the writings of Galileo, Redi, and a handful of others, and with politics in the writings of Machiavelli and a few other early authors, perfectly successful as to the language and subject matter, so far as the times and the ideas then prevailing allowed. But good Italian has never been applied to the philosophical genre that we might generally call metaphysical, embracing ethics, ideology, psychology (the science of feelings, passions, and the human heart), logic, the subtler politics, etc. Yet this genre is the chief part, indeed almost the whole of present-day life and studies. (13 July 1821.)

  The terms of scholastic philosophy can in large part serve very well in modern philosophy, either used with the same meanings (even if modern philosophy has other equivalents) which would do no harm to precision, since they are terms whose precise value is known; or twisting the meaning a little with no harm to clarity, etc. And these terms would fit very well with the character of the Italian language, which already has so many of them, and whose early writers, starting with Dante, used scholastic philosophy so much, and introduced it into the more refined, etc., writings. Apart from the fact that all or almost all of these terms derive from Latin, [1318] or from Greek by way of Latin, etc. Even in this last respect the study of barbarian Latin can be very useful to us, and I know from my own study of it how many of these terms that have fallen into disuse correspond precisely to other terms from modern philosophy which to us sound alien and barbarous, and can be precisely understood by all as meaning what the recent terms mean, and likewise how many others would be eminently well-suited, and very useful, even though they may not have equivalents today, etc. etc., indeed all the more. Add that, although they have fallen into disuse in modern philosophical writers, many of these terms are still in use in the Schools, or in some of them, and for this, and for other reasons, they are universally and precisely and clearly understood. (13 July 1821.) See p. 1402.