Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  Z 1628

  1. See Genesis 3:22. See also Z 433–35.

  Z 1630

  1. Pacella cites the Gazzetta di Milano for 16 December 1819, where one Domenico Bruno is said to have been so successful in training even wild animals that “one could well have supposed them to be endowed with the reason that is generally denied them.” In one of his acts fleas pulled golden carriages, cannons, etc. On “habituation” see Z 1452–53 and note, 1761–63.

  Z 1631

  1. It is not known whether there was ever a copy of this edition in the LL. In Geschichte des Weisen Danischmend und der drei Kalender, a barbed political satire originally published in 1775, Christoph Martin Wieland had poked fun at social hypocrisies and at contemporary despotism. Chapter 11 was entitled “The Calendar tells Danischmend in confidence what he thinks of the human species.” On Wieland cf. Z 2618, 2710 and Cellerino (B12), see Staël’s positive judgment on Wieland in De l’Allemagne, part 2, ch. 4. The Italian translation cited by Leopardi does not have a publication date.

  Z 1633

  1. See also Z 1610–11, 1717, and 1802. Exercise is a means of habituation and the basis of imitation. See, e.g., Z 1370–71.

  Z 1634

  1. Leopardi had himself translated into Italian the fragments of Dionysius of Halicarnassus published by Mai in 1816. There we learn that the Romans, by dint of strenuous exercise, were able to match the naturally more vigorous Gauls. The following parenthesis is a marginal addition.

  Z 1636

  1. See Z 1658.

  2. Dutens, Origine, part 2, ch. 1 (on Leibniz), tome 1, pp. 70–81.

  Z 1637

  1. The accommodationist view of divine revelation expressed here was developed by biblical scholars in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Leopardi’s argument, as expounded here and in other thoughts (e.g., Z 2263–64), is that God adjusted revelation to fit altering states of human society, and that revelation was therefore not absolute but relative.

  Z 1639

  1. On this subject see Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell, Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1986. Fontenelle’s works (including an Italian trans. of Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes) were in the LL (and cf. also Z 84 and note 1, 1642). On the possibility of infinite worlds and their perfection see the quotation from St. Thomas on Z 1790.

  Z 1641

  1. What it meant to love one’s enemy is spelled out on Z 1710ff.

  2. Cf. Z 1637 and note. See also Z 2263–64.

  Z 1642

  1. See Z 1639 and note.

  Z 1645

  1. Later on Leopardi will judge that the “being who is or was the author of such an order” (“in this particular guise”) cannot help but seem to be a wicked demiurge: cf. Z 4485–86, 4511.

  Z 1648

  1. In Leopardi’s note there is a marginal unattached addition from 1827 which repeats an anecdote recounted on Z 1178 (Pacella).

  Z 1649

  1. This thought recurs several times in Leopardi, and sometimes leads to Faustian musings (cf. in particular the scene “Night,” in Goethe’s Faust, ll. 634–43, just before Faust’s attempt at suicide). On the insensitivity and indifference reached by the “man of deep feeling” cf. also Z 2107–10, 2208–10, 2473–74, 3058. Leopardi alludes to the ethical consequences of this passage from one excess to the other (once again in accordance with Goethe’s Faust) in Pensieri, XVI (Prose, p. 293), and in his dialogue (not included in the Operette morali) “Galantuomo e Mondo” (ibid., pp. 246–58), where the “Good man” repents his virtue.

  Z 1650

  1. The last two sentences were a marginal addition. Imagination contributes to philosophy and, more in general, to knowledge in that it allows human beings to see similarities between phenomena and concepts (see Z 947, 1190 for the speculation regarding relationships; Z 66, 157, 3649 for the concept of “analogy”). In Condillac the role of imagination (“the power … to unite and link together the most unrelated ideas,” Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, ch. 9, § 75, in Oeuvres, tome 1, p. 119), is subordinated, as Gensini notes (Linguistica leopardiana, pp. 79–81 [B11]), to that of analysis (“Imagination would be nothing without analysis,” La logique, part 2, ch. 5, ibid., tome 22, p. 137). In his description of the powers of imagination and of poetic and philosophical speech, Leopardi seems sometimes to be influenced by elements of neo-Platonic organicism, which brings him very near to the English and the German Romantics (cf., e.g., Z 1833–40, 1855–56), in contradiction to earlier thoughts against the Romantics and on the enmity between poetry and philosophy (cf. Z 1231). See Z 1833–39, 2132–34, 3237–45, 3269–71, 3382–85, 3717–18, 4221 and note 3, 4495. Cf. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria vol. 1, p. lxxxvii, on Condillac’s and Coleridge’s division of imagination in a philosophical context.

  Z 1651

  1. The phrase “nor does he live with himself,” and the parenthesis that follows it, are an interlinear addition made in 1827.

  Z 1654

  1. The spelling of this name is normally “Montenoy,” which explains why Leopardi makes this comment.

  2. The Dissertation on the Progress of the Arts is printed in Dutens, Origine, tome 1, pp. 206–15, the passage cited is on p. 209 (emphasis by Leopardi). Charles Palissot de Montenoy, poet and man of letters, was an adversary of the Encyclopedists, whom he had lampooned in his satirical comedy, Les philosophes.

  Z 1655

  1. Dutens, Origine, part 1, ch. 1 (on Descartes and Locke), § 10, tome 1, p. 32. Dutens paraphrases here an assertion by Descartes (drawn from the Principia philosophiae, part 1, § 1) that Leopardi rephrases below, on Z 1720, as “the friend of truth must doubt everything once in his life.”

  Z 1656

  1. The passage is the same as that quoted on Z 1473 (the page number is omitted in the ms.).

  2. Leopardi’s note is an unattached marginal ms. addition, in which he cites Cicero, Ad familiares 16, 21 and the oration “Post reditum in Senatu,” 11.

  Z 1657

  1. Cited from Forcellini (a marginal addition).

  2. Condillac (known to Leopardi through the works of Sulzer and Soave quoted on Z 1053–54) had stated that there cannot be ideas without language (La logique, part 2, ch. 5, in Oeuvres, tome 22, p. 133). Leopardi uses the same metaphor of the body on Z 2584. See also Z 1103, and, for the general context, Z 601–606, 1025–26, 1262, 1388–90.

  Z 1658

  1. See Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, ed. Jacques Brunschwig, bk. 4, ch. 16, Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966, p. 419. See Z 1636.

  2. Xenophon, Cyropaedia 6, 2, 29; Memorabilia 4, 3, 9.

  Z 1659

  1. We have substituted an English phonetic spelling for Leopardi’s Italian-sounding version of the word, which he writes as ampire. There follows a marginal addition.

  2. Perticari, Degli scrittori del Trecento, p. 114, remarks on the great number of aberrant spellings made by both Dante and Petrarch.

  Z 1660

  1. Lionardo Salviati, in Degli avvertimenti della lingua sopra il Decamerone, Naples 1712, bk. 3, ch. 4, § 7, vol. 1, p. 265, though Leopardi may have read this observation elsewhere, e.g., in the Crusca (Pacella).

  Z 1665

  1. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ch. 14, Oeuvres, vol. 5, p. 415, had observed that beauty in sounds pertains to nature but that harmony, “having only conventional beauties … brings no pleasure at all to ears which have no experience of it” (Damiani).

  Z 1669

  1. Barbocosacco was a tawny color, associated with the fleece hats worn by the Cossacks who invaded France in 1814; Napoleone is a shade of blue.

  Z 1672

  1. That is, nature from an aesthetic point of view.

  2. It is not clear where Leopardi, who did not own De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe, could read Sismondi’s remark that “there was no epic poem as such in any of the Romance languages” prior to the Lus
iads, and that Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata only appeared “a year after Camoens’s death” (Paris 1813, ch. 37, tome 4, pp. 330–31). Certainly not—as Pacella asserts—in the preface to Antonio Nervi’s translation of the Lusiads, Milan 1821 (= LL). Goffredo was the title of the first, unauthorized edition of the Gerusalemme liberata, published in Venice in 1580 by Celio Malespini.

  Z 1676

  1. Not in the sense that knowledge is a memory of “ideas” (as in Plato), but that, on the contrary, it is the recollection of sensations born of experience. Locke’s name (spelled “Loke”) was added in 1827.

  Z 1679

  1. “Osservazione ridotta a dialogo. Un francese e un italiano,” in Monti, Proposta, vol. 2, part 1, p. 190.

  Z 1681

  1. In the ms. a marginal addition follows, which continues until the reference to p. 1752.

  Z 1687

  1. Leopardi agrees with the conclusions of Rousseau’s Du contrat social, although the pages of the volume held in the LL remained mostly uncut. The “philosophers” to whom Leopardi refers here are probably the Stoics (cf., e.g., Z 274–75, 2245), although his definition would fit the Epicureans even better.

  Z 1688

  1. See Leopardi, “Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica” (Prose, p. 418).

  Z 1690

  1. This sentence is a later addition.

  Z 1692

  1. The following two sentences are a ms. marginal addition from 1827.

  2. Chateaubriand, Génie du Christianisme, part 2, bk. 2, ch. 10, p. 105.

  Z 1693

  1. Staël, De l’Allemagne, part 2, ch. 14.

  Z 1694

  1. Leopardi probably took this observation from an anonymous review of his canzone “Ad Angelo Mai” that appeared in the Giornale Arcadico di scienze, lettere ed arti, tome 8, 1820, p. 283 (Pacella).

  Z 1695

  1. There follows a ms. marginal addition.

  Z 1697

  1. This sentence was written in the margin of the ms. Cf. Z 2184–86 and note (on originality); but also, on the other hand, Z 3941–42.

  Z 1700

  1. A marginal addition from 1827, the year in which Leopardi made the acquaintance, in Pisa, of the doctor and man of letters Gaetano Cioni. The passage from Vegetius, cited on p. 10, note 19 of Cioni’s text, “Della veterinaria di Pelagonio, Lettera al Sig. March. Gino Capponi” (extract from Antologia, vol. 26, no. 78, June 1827, pp. 24–47), contrasts the vigor of animals in the wild with the diminished energy of those that have been domesticated. The same idea had been expounded, as Damiani has pointed out, by Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, in Oeuvres, vol. 3, p. 139.

  Z 1701

  1. That is, the system of classification invented by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus), and presented in his Systema naturae.

  Z 1708

  1. Cicero, Somnium Scipionis 7, a passage cited on Z 593 and translated on Z 643.

  Z 1709

  1. The LL contained a copy of Memorie intorno alla guerra de’ francesi in Ispagna, Milan 1816, by Albert-Jean Michel di Rocca, a Genevan man of letters who in 1811 had secretly married Madame de Staël. Leopardi here cites pp. 31–32.

  2. Cf. Z 209, note 2 and 2660, 2672 and note 4 on the “supposed” and the “true” natural law.

  3. In this sentence, “that which” and “the author” are references to nature.

  Z 1711

  1. See Luke 10:27.

  2. The ms. had originally read “Christ,” with “Word” substituted for it in 1827.

  Z 1714

  1. Cf. Z 154 and note 2.

  Z 1715

  1. Leopardi has here in mind Theophrastus and (among the moderns) Rousseau or Staël, as on Z 318. Note that here the “half philosopher” condemns illusions from an idealistic or ideological point of view, that is, because he believes in an absolute truth, whereas the “true philosopher” loves illusions because he has no such pretense. Confusingly, this makes the latter similar to the figure of the “half philosopher” described by Leopardi on Z 520, who, not yet having reached an annihilating “full” or “perfect” philosophy, is capable of action because, from Leopardi’s point of view, “he is not deluded.”

  Z 1717

  1. Diogenes Laertius 1, 99. See Z 1610–11, 1632–33, 1802. The Seven Sages are cited on Z 4441.

  Z 1720

  1. Leopardi took this quotation from Dutens (cf. Z 1655 and note), although several editions of the Principia philosophiae were in the LL.

  Z 1724

  1. In the ms. the numbers are lacking. Leopardi may have meant to refer, as Pacella supposes, to Lucile’s feelings of rivalry toward Corinne (bk. 20, ch. 4). The passage from bk. 10, ch. 6—transcribed on Z 4481–82—treats jealousy aroused by success in love, but in relation to men. We have not been able to establish from where Leopardi got the story of Schiller’s supposed hostility to Goethe.

  Z 1725

  1. Cicero, De amicitia 6, 20.

  Z 1729

  1. Staël, Corinne, tome 1, pp. 297–98. In the novel these words are spoken by Prince Castel-Forte, arguing with the Count d’Erfeuil, an advocate of literary nationalism.

  Z 1732

  1. One cannot help but be reminded of ch. 34 of The Education of Henry Adams, “A Law of Acceleration.” The idea of acceleration—Leopardi later says—is “of the utmost importance” (Z 1767). Cf. also Z 1315, 1891, 1896.

  Z 1733

  1. Cf. the early thought on Z 183–85 where Leopardi distinguishes voluntary from involuntary memory. See also Z 1455.

  Z 1738

  1. Etienne Montgolfier, in “Sur l’utilité des globes volants” (1783), had expressed the belief that one day the airways would be as open to travel and trade as the oceans. See Charles C. Gillispie, The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783–1784, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U.P., 1983, pp. 122–24. See Z 4198–99.

  Z 1740

  1. This thought resembles a palimpsest, with three lengthy interpolations: “seafaring … very late indeed,” “that very few … notable discovery),” “And because … absence.” See Z 836 and note, 1086.

  2. See Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (in Oeuvres, vol. 3, pp. 169–70).

  Z 1741

  1. The parenthesis is a marginal addition. Leopardi’s “conversion” to literature began in 1815, or in 1814, when he made his first translations from Greek poets, the Scherzi epigrammatici, though in retrospect he would date it to early 1816 (as in his letters to Pietro Giordani of 30 April and 30 May 1817). The process was characterized by a gradual distancing from mere erudition, from “pure, dry philology” (Z 193) and lasted up until 1819, a year that saw him pass from literature and poetry “to reason and truth” (Z 144). On the importance of Leopardi’s discovery of Greek poetry in the original see F. D’Intino, Introduction to G. Leopardi, Poeti greci e latini, Rome 1999 (B2).

  Z 1742

  1. Cf. Z 22, note 1.

  Z 1743

  1. See Z 3197–98 and note.

  Z 1747

  1. Among the causes of the sublime, Edmund Burke mentioned “the noise of vast cataracts, raging storms…” and “the shouting of multitudes” that “by the sole strength of the sound … amazes and confounds the imagination” (A Philosophical Enquiry, part 2, ch. 17, p. 151). In the Italian translation Ricerca filosofica (= LL), this passage features in part 2, ch. 18, p. 99.

  2. The mathematician Louis-Bertrand Castel, a French Jesuit inspired by Newtonian optics, wrote a treatise on the melody of colors (Optique des couleurs, Paris 1740), and invented a clavecin oculaire, or ocular harpsichord, based upon the idea of an equivalence between the seven colors and the seven units of the scale. Rousseau mentions him and his invention in Confessions, bk. 7 (in Oeuvres, vol. 1, pp. 282–83).

  Z 1751

  1. Carlo Galamini presided over the Regency instituted by La Hoz at Macerata during the anti-French uprising of summer 1799. Don Vincenzo Ferri, chaplain to the Leopardi famil
y, had died in 1806. Dr. Masi had a medical practice in Recanati.

  Z 1761

  1. The translation of Albert-Jean-Michel Rocca’s Mémoires sur la guerre des Français en Espagne that Leopardi cites was held in the LL.

  Z 1762

  1. See Z 1452–53 and note.

  Z 1764

  1. That is, rhymes or rhythmic speech to remember things by.

  Z 1765

  1. In emphasizing material aids to memory Leopardi certainly had in mind the ars memoriae of classical and Renaissance rhetorical tradition, mentioned on Z 2379. He and his father, Monaldo, made use of such techniques, and the idea itself of a Zibaldone was born out of that tradition.

  Z 1766

  1. Rousseau too (Émile, bk. 1, in Oeuvres, vol. 4, p. 284 and p. 298) had maintained that the baby, prior to organizing its own sensations, does not have memory, and “is not even aware of its own existence” (Damiani).

  Z 1767

  1. See Z 1732 and note.

  Z 1769

  1. In the ms. this sentence is a marginal addition.

  Z 1770

  1. Cf. Z 3200 and note.

  Z 1777

  1. In the ms. this last sentence is a marginal addition from 1827.

  Z 1778

  1. Leopardi has Byron and Chateaubriand in mind here.

  Z 1779

  1. Horace, Odes 1, 7; 3, 21; 4, 12; Epodes 9 and 13.

  Z 1781

  1. According to G. Martini, it is figuration, or canto fiorito, that determines the “grace and perfection” of a song, and adds value to “laudable simplicity” (Storia della musica, vol. 1, p. 204 = LL).

  Z 1783

  1. That is, those who hold that there is an innate and universal sense of harmony.

  Z 1789

  1. The verse translation is by Martin Thom. See Z 27 and note 3.

  Z 1790

  1. The Neapolitan translator of Dutens, Ottavio Maria Chiarizia, appended to the work his essay Attempt at a Compromise Between the Ancients and the Moderns, where, in ch. 19, § 2, p. 286, he quotes St. Thomas, Quaestiones disputatae: “De potentia,” 3, §§ 16–17 (“The universe as created by God is the best possible in respect of the things that exist, but not in respect of the things that God is able to create”), and “De veritate” 20, 4. On the debate on the possible forms of manifestation of the divine power from St. Thomas to Leibniz see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U.P., 1986, in particular ch. 3, part 2, § 5. In writing this thought Leopardi probably had in mind his theological discussion on Z 1637–45; and see subsequent entries on the perfection of what exists (as against preexistent ideas), e.g., Z 1907–908.