I have recently discovered a book, the Zibaldone by the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837). Zibaldone is an Italian word meaning commonplace book, a book in which a person writes down ideas, quotations, anecdotes, observations, and information, things one gathers through a lifetime of living and learning. Marcus Aurelius and Petrarch both kept one. Bill Gates keeps one. Ronald Reagan kept his on note cards. I have been keeping one since 1961 but called it a journal. I like the Italian word. It sounds – well – exotically foreign. When you say it, you sing it. And so few words in my vocabulary start with ‘Z’ it is nice to have a new one. [GOOGLE Zibaldone]
But back to Leopardi’s Zibaldone.
He ponders: nature, poetry, politics, philosophy, current events and the currents through history that carried these events to his time and place.
He loves language; the sound, the uses, the origins, the way words shine on and bounce off each other. He traces the etymology of words; the parents, grandparents, the aunts, uncles, and cousins of words.
He loves the ancient world and dreamed of how primordial man and woman might have created ‘world’ before the likes of Plato showed up to turn felt bodily experience into thought abstractions.
He is greatly concerned with happiness, so naturally we can assume he was an unhappy man. Happiness does not often lead one to deep philosophical reflection. For that, a certain amount of disquietude is necessary, plus time and circumstance to contemplate unhappiness and write down your reflections at your leisure.
Leopardi’s greatest passion was poetry; writing and reading. He writes about specific poetic traditions; Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French, German, English, Icelandic, but he is especially interested in the quality of language poetry requires, a language of opposites: precise and metaphoric, evocative and provocative, explicit and ambiguous, sensual and reasonable. Here is an example:
The mind that is only open to pure truth is capable of few truths. It can discover little that is true, can know and feel few truths in their true aspect, and few true and great relationships between those truths, and cannot apply the results of its observations and reasonings very well. . . . The quest for truths, especially the most important ones, and above all those having to do with the science of man, needs the mixing and balanced tempering of utterly opposed qualities, imagination, feeling and reason, heat and cold, life and death, a lively character and a subdued one, a robust one and a languid one. (page 869, section 1962, Oct. 21, 1821)
Leopardi’s Zibaldone has been brilliantly edited by Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino and translated into fresh English by a team of seven. This is a good thing. My Italian does not extend much beyond ciao, prego, and arrivederci. Contained within 2071 pages are 4526 sections with an additional 429 pages of index and notes.
The Zibaldone of Leopardi is like an extended vacation, with a little luck I will never finish.
And I am feeling lucky.