Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  What I have said regarding a language that is spoken universally as though one’s own, is true equally of that dreamed-of language which all civilized nations, both learned and unlearned, were to write as though it were their own, the various national languages remaining in use solely in order to be spoken, very like the various languages or popular dialects in the dark ages, with everyone, including notaries, etc., writing every kind of document in Latin, corrupt or barbarian Latin and different in different places, but nonetheless still Latin everywhere.

  So I conclude that a language universally spoken or written, or both, by all nations, or even only civilized ones, and understood as their own, is impossible, not just extrinsically and for extrinsic reasons, but also because of its own, intrinsic nature and qualities and properties and essence, not relatively or accidentally, but essentially, necessarily, and absolutely.1 (25 August, Feast of St. Bartholomew, 1823.)

  Movere [to move] neuter, or in elliptical form short for movere se [to move oneself] or movere castra [to move camp], as in Italian muovere [to move] [3263] neuter or elliptical (see also trarre [to drag]), which I believe I quoted an example of from Florus elsewhere [→Z 501–502], see also Suetonius in Divus Julius, Ch. 61, § 1 and scholars’ notes.1 See also in this respect, if you will, Poliziano, Stanze 1, 22, where you will find muovere neuter, without the accompaniment of the sixth case,2 again as in Latin. (25 Aug., Feast of St. Bartholomew, 1823.)

  For p. 2889. Tumultuo and tumultuor [to make an uproar], from tumultus us [uproar]. Acuo [to sharpen to a point] from acus us [needle], is of the third conjugation, by something which, given the number, or indeed the plethora, of examples that show that such verbs are regularly from the first, we may call an anomaly. Cf. statuo is [to cause to stand] from status us [to be still]. Arcuo as [to bend like a bow] from arcus us [bow]. (26 Aug. 1823.)

  Grassor aris continuative of gradior eris [to walk], the participle of which in us today has irregularly become gressus, while in ancient times, as the continuative form shows, the more regular grassus existed. Gressus also in compounds, which like many others change the a of gradior to e; ingredior [to enter], aggredior [to go to], etc. Thus also ascendo [to ascend], etc., from scando [to climb], and see p. 2843. (26 Aug. 1823.)

  [3264] For p. 2864. Castello, château, castillo [castle] in Romance languages take the place of the positive castrum [fortress], with which castellum [small fortress] was often exchanged in Latin, too, or used as an equivalent, etc. (26 Aug. 1823.)

  Gallicisms that are very familiar, common, and colloquial in France, tant mieux [so much the better], tant pis [too bad], elliptical or irregular phrases which appear to be genuine French idioms, are in fact Latinisms, indeed Latin idioms, that is Latin colloquialisms. See scholars on fable 5, bk. 3 of Phaedrus, “Aesopus et Petulans.”1 See also if Forcellini has anything, Crusca, etc. In Italian, too, we say colloquially and write tanto meglio, tanto peggio [so much the worse, so much the better], but less elliptically and more naturally and regularly, indeed for the most part very regularly, and a great deal less often than the French. (26 Aug. 1823.)

  For p. 2996, margin—these, I believe, come from medeor [to heal] (medeo was still said, as medeor is found also in the passive), not from medicus [curative]. I deduce this specifically from seeing medicor [to heal], a deponent verb like medeor (where medico would correspond to the ancient medeo), and again from seeing that medicatus and medicatus sum supply for the verb medeor what it lacks in the praeterite and the participle ending in us. See Forcellini under Medeor, end. See pp. 3352ff. regarding the continuative meditor [to reflect upon, to consider, to ponder] from medeor formed from its participle ending in us. (26 Aug. 1823.)

  [3265] One may say that the views, designs, propositions, purposes, hopes, desires of man, basically everything in his thoughts which relates to the future, extend all the further, that is aim, tend, and reach so much further, the less the amount of life that naturally remains to him, and vice versa. No thought of a newborn child relates to the future, unless the future is considered to include the instant that comes immediately after the present moment, for the present is in fact but an instant, and apart from this one single instant, time is always and entirely either past or future.1 But considering the present and future broadly, rather than precisely and mathematically, that is, in accordance with how we are accustomed to think of it and refer to it, one has to say that a baby thinks only of the present. Nor does a child think that much further, which is why proposing to a child (for instance in his studies) a purpose that is distant in time (such as the glory and advantages to be acquired in mature life or old age, or even in youth) is absolutely useless in terms of inspiring him. (So it is absolutely right and useful to entice the boy to study by proposing to him honors and advantages that he [3266] can and must achieve in a very short space of time, indeed almost day by day, for this is akin to bringing the purpose of the glory and usefulness of his studies closer, before his very eyes, without which he would never be able to fix his eyes on such a goal, and in order to achieve which he would willingly subject himself to trials and sufferings that are repugnant to nature but which his studies require.) The thoughts of a young man extend further, but much less far than those of the man who is mature and at rest, whose calculations regarding the future often, and without him noticing, go much further than the space of life normally assigned to human mortals. For the mature man is already beginning to take enormous delight and content with hope and to feed his life with it. The young man equally nourishes himself with the same hope, and communicates with it and dreams of it, and the child too, but not in such a way that they are satisfied with it, or that they do not seek to bring about and implement what they hope for and get down to action. This is born of the ardor of those ages, of the activity of the mind combining and conspiring with that of the body, of the [3267] freshness and vigor of their self-love, and hence of the energy and efficacy of their desires which are impatient with delays, and therefore cannot tolerate proposing an objective that they cannot or do not believe they can achieve in a short space of time and in the short term; and finally, of the lack of experience that they have of the vanity of human hopes, of the difficulties that man experiences in bringing them to fruition, and of the emptiness of the hoped-for ambitions themselves, which inevitably becomes manifest as soon as they are achieved. The opposite causes are what bring about the extent and the distance in the thoughts of the mature man, and a surfeit of these opposite qualities brings about an excess of the opposite effect in old age, which, reduced to not being able to reasonably guarantee any more than a very brief residue of life, nonetheless exceeds all other ages of man in terms of how far its prospects extend. And so an old man, because of the weakness of his body and mind, and his disenchantment with human goods already experienced, and the enfeeblement of self-love which goes hand-in-hand with what we may refer to as almost the ebbing and cooling [3268] of life, is capable only of weak desires, and thus contents himself with proposing an objective for them that is distant, and with keeping them there, his desires also being content to stay in that place; because of his daily experience of the vanity and disappointment of hopes, he directs them almost by means of a stratagem to places so distant that, when they come close to those places and reach them, they can only disappear very late or not at all; because of the lack of resolution which is proper to his age, putting off every action until later, and being forced also to put off and almost defer his hopes and the objects of his desires and their achievement which he proposes for himself, or rather in which he delights to contemplate; because of the habit of tardiness and slowness in acting, to which he is constrained by the weight and impotence of his age, and because of the laziness, negligence, and torpor of the mind which derives from it and is also its cause: for these reasons his desires too and his hopes become tardy, lazy, and slow, and almost neglected (although still sufficiently alive to maintain and almost suckle him, as is [3269] indispensably necessary for human life), and he manage
s to persuade himself not with his intellect but with his imagination and the unreasoned habit of the other faculties of his spirit, that time, nature, and things have become, and have to be, as slow and as lazy in acting as he himself necessarily is.1 (26 August 1823.)

  The lyric poet, when inspired, the philosopher in the sublimity of speculation, the man of imagination and sentiment in the throes of enthusiasm, any man at the height of a strong passion, in the enthusiasm of weeping, I would dare add, half-warmed by wine, sees and looks at things as though from a high place, higher than that which the mind of man normally occupies. Hence, in discovering all at once many more things than he would ordinarily be accustomed to notice at one time, and in discerning and seeing at a single glance2 a multitude of objects, each of which he has seen individually on many occasions but never all together (apart from in similar circumstances), along with them he is able to see all their reciprocal relations, and as a result of the novelty of this multitude [3270] of objects that presents itself to him all together, he is led to consider these objects, albeit fleetingly, better than he has done before this time, and better than he is used to doing, and to want to look at and note these relationships. Hence in this moment he has an extraordinary ability to generalize (extraordinary at least with respect to himself and what constitutes ordinary as far as his own mind is concerned), and uses this ability. And in using it he discovers those general and thus also genuinely great and important truths, which in vain outside of that moment, outside of that inspiration and almost μανία [frenzy] and fury, whether philosophical or passionate or poetical or other, in vain, I say, by means of long, patient, and painstaking research, experience, comparisons, studies, reasoning, meditations, exercise of the mind, the intellect, the faculty of thinking, reflecting, observing, reasoning; in vain, I say again, not just this man or poet or philosopher, but any other poet or intellect or the most acute and penetrating of philosophers, or indeed many philosophers combining together, or the centuries themselves, with their successive advancing of the human spirit, would seek to discover, or understand or explain, in the same way that [3271] this man, gazing at such inspiration, is able to do easily, perfectly, and fully at that moment, and thereafter to himself and to others, provided he is capable of expressing his own concepts well, and provided he has the things conceived and felt in that moment clearly and distinctly present before him. (26 Aug. 1823.)

  Based on what I observe (see pp. 3765–68) and as may be explained by the reasons I have put forward elsewhere [→Z 97–99, 1589, 1605], the habit of feeling compassion, of benefiting or acting in some other way on behalf of others, and where that faculty is lacking, the inclination to charity and to act in favor of others are always (assuming all other circumstances are equal, in terms of character or nature, upbringing, cultivation of spirit or uncouthness, and similar) in direct proportion to the strength, good fortune, and lack of (or minimal) need that an individual has of action and help from others, and in inverse proportion to weakness, unhappiness, experience of misfortunes or ills, whether past, or even more so in the present, and the need that man has of the help and good offices of others. The more man is in a state of being [3272] the object of compassion, or of desiring or requiring it, even wrongly, and the more he persuades himself that he is deserving of it, the less he himself feels compassion, for he then turns in on himself all the natural faculty and habit of feeling compassion which he may have previously had. The more man has need of charity from others, the less he himself not only is charitable, but is inclined to be so; not only does he exercise it less, but also he loves the less that charity in himself which he craves or demands from others, and rightly or wrongly believes he deserves or needs. The man who is weak and always in need of those greater or lesser offices that are received or given in society, and which constitute the chief objective to which society is directed, or the objective to which the mutual intercourse of men ought chiefly to serve, is barely or not at all inclined to perform his services to others, and rarely or never performs them, or only to a negligible degree, even when he is able to, and even to men who are weaker and more needy than he himself is. The man who is used to misfortunes, and [3273] in particular one for whom life is synonymous with and companion to suffering, is not moved in the slightest, or is so in a wholly ineffectual way, by the sight or the thought of other ills or travails or sufferings. Self-love in an unhappy individual is too taken up with itself to be able to share its interest between this individual and others like him. It has sufficient to exercise itself with when it has its own misfortunes, even if these are more minor than those that in any way present themselves to him in others. If his misfortunes are in the present, compassion, as I have said, is entirely turned in and employed on itself, and is consumed in it, and none is left for others. If they are in the past, even if they were minor, the recollection of them ensures that man finds nothing extraordinary or terrible in the sufferings and disasters of others, nothing that merits his renouncing his self-love in order to deploy it for the benefit of others. As one already well versed in suffering, he contents himself with counseling the unhappy, silently and to himself, to resign themselves to their fate, and believes that he has a right to require it, almost as though [3274] he himself had already set the example. For everyone in some way persuades themselves that they have tolerated, or tolerate, their misfortunes and sufferings as manfully as possible, and with greater constancy than others, or at least than the majority of men would do or have done in their circumstances, in the same way that everyone thinks of themselves as being or as having been more undeserving of the ills which befall or have befallen them than anyone else. In addition to which, the habit of being insensitive to the disasters of others, contracted at the time when one was oneself suffering misfortune, is not one that is easy to shake off, for it is too well suited to self-love, which is to say, to the nature of man, and also because the impression that misfortune makes on mortal man is great and profound, and hence the effect it produces and leaves is lasting, and very often decisive for his character for the rest of his life, and perpetual.