Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today I want to
take you to a very specific place. It's not a
happy place necessarily, but it is an intensely
beautiful one. I like that framing. Imagine,
if you will, a library. But not the kind with
beanbags and, you know, reliable Wi -Fi. No,
no. We are picturing a freezing cold, high -ceilinged
room in a stone palace. We're in the early 1800s.
And the air is just thick with dust and the smell
of old paper. And inside this library is a prisoner.
Prisoner who is also the warden, in a sense.
A self -imposed sentence, almost. Right. And
this prisoner is a young boy. And he is physically
broken. And I don't mean just a little frail.
I'm talking about a guy who becomes a hunchback,
who can barely see, who lives in constant...
Constant pain. Yeah, debilitating pain. He almost
never leaves his small, suffocating provincial
town. And yet this man, Giacomo Leopardi, possesses
a mind that is currently roaming the cosmos,
dismantling every single illusion that human
beings use to get out of bed in the morning.
It's just such a striking paradox, isn't it?
You have this extreme physical constraint. A
life lived in, you know, a few square meters
in what were then the papal states, contrasted
with an intellectual boundlessness that is, frankly...
Well, it's terrifying. We are talking about Giacomo
Leopardi. Now, if you're Italian, you probably
just had a visceral flashback to high school,
memorizing his poems and maybe rolling your eyes
at his gloominess. Oh, for sure. He's required
reading. But if you aren't Italian, you might
never have heard of him. And that's a shame because
he is often called the father of modern nihilism.
He's the guy who looked at the universe and said,
it doesn't care about you at all. Which, on the
surface, sounds like the most depressing topic
we could possibly choose for a deep dive. Hey
everyone, tune in to hear why existence is futile.
I know, right? It's a hard sell. But here is
the hook, the mission, if you will, for this
exploration. We want to understand why reading
Leopardi, despite his reputation as the absolute
king of gloom, doesn't actually feel depressing.
No, it doesn't. It feels strangely life -affirming.
Deeply human. We're going to dig into his massive
notebook, Zibaldone, his major poems, the Conti,
his philosophical dialogues, the operette Morali,
and his life story to understand this whole concept
of cosmic pessimism. And we'll see why thinkers
like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and even Samuel
Beckett later looked back at this frail Italian
man and said, OK, he got it. He understood the
fundamental problem of existence before any of
us really did. So let's set the scene. We are
in Reconati. It's a hilltop town in the March
region of Italy. At the time, early 1800s, this
isn't exactly a booming metropolis. No, and context
is everything here. Reconati was part of the
Papal States. This wasn't the Italy of the Renaissance
or the Risorgimento that was just around the
corner. It was a stifling, conservative, reactionary
environment. So the church is in charge, basically.
The church is in charge, and the mood is very
much anti -Enlightenment. You know, the revolutions
in France and America, the focus on reason. Reconati
was trying very, very hard to pretend the last
hundred years just hadn't happened. And sitting
at the top of this stifling town is the Plotocilia
Party. This is where Giacomo was born in 1798.
And if you think your family holidays are tense,
wait until you meet the Leopardis. Let's start
with the father. Count Minaldo. Count Minaldo
is a fascinating contradiction. He was a nobleman,
a committed reactionary who absolutely hated
the French Revolution, hated the very idea of
progress. And he just wanted the world to stay
anchored in traditional feudal values. A real
traditionalist. A diehard traditionalist. He
once wore a sword in public just to make a point
about how things used to be. But he loved literature.
He loved books so much. basically bankrupt the
family buying them. He built this massive, famous
library in the house. It had something like 20
,000 volumes. Which was an enormous private collection
for the time. It became Giacomo's entire world.
But then you have the mother, Martianus Adelaide
in Ticimete. And if Manaldo was the book -loving
dreamer, Adelaide was the iron fist. The sources
describe her as cold and authoritarian. And honestly,
that might be an understatement. It really might,
because Manaldo had squandered the family fortune
not just on books, but also on gambling. She
took over the management of the entire estate,
and her one single -minded obsession was restoring
the family wealth and reputation. There's this
detail in the biographies that she imposed a
rigorous discipline of religion and economy.
Just doesn't sound like a warm, fuzzy home. It
sounds like a place of rules. It was a place
of extreme austerity. She was deeply religious,
but in a severe, almost punitive way. There's
a really chilling detail where she is described
as envying parents whose children died young.
Envying them. Why? Because those children went
straight to heaven without having the chance
to sin. She viewed life on Earth essentially
as a risk management problem for the soul. The
less time you spent here, the less chance you
had to mess up and go to hell. That is, wow.
Okay, so you have a home ruled by a father who
retreats into the past, into his books, and a
mother who runs the present like a prison warden,
obsessed with balancing the books. Not just the
financial books, but the spiritual ones, too.
And in the middle of this is young Giacomo. Exactly.
And where does a sensitive, brilliant child go
in that environment? He goes to the one place
where he has any kind of freedom. He climbs the
ladder in his father's library. This brings us
to part one of our story. The Cage and the Mad
and Desperate Studies. This phrase, Studimati
et Desperatissimi, is Leopardi's own description
of his youth. We're talking about the years roughly
between 1809 and 1816. He's a child prodigy,
but prodigy feels too small a word. It doesn't
capture the intensity of it. And he was mostly
self -taught, right? His parents didn't really
guide this. Effectively, yes. He had some tutors,
local priests mostly, but he outpaced them so
quickly by the time he was 10 or 12, they had
nothing left to teach him. So he just sat in
the library and read everything. And when I say
everything, I mean, he taught himself Latin,
Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and some English.
On his own. On his own, in a cold room in Reconadi.
And he wasn't just reading, he was producing.
By age 14 or 15, he's writing a history of astronomy.
He writes an essay on the popular errors of the
ancients. I mean, these aren't like... High school
book reports. These are serious philological
works. Philology, the study of language and historical
texts. That was his first obsession. He's translating
ancient manuscripts, correcting errors in Latin
texts that had stumped professional scholars
for centuries. He is doing the work of a seasoned
academic at Oxford or the Sorbonne, but he's
a teenager. It's unbelievable. It's like his
mind was a muscle and he was working it out 16
hours a day every day for seven years. But let's
talk about the cost of that. Because you can't
just download that much data into a human brain,
especially a developing one, without consequences.
He calls them mad and desperate for a reason.
The physical toll was catastrophic, absolutely
devastating. Imagine a growing boy sitting hunched
over parchment by candlelight for seven years,
barely moving, barely eating, just reading and
writing. His health completely collapsed. This
is when the spinal deformity develops. Yes. The
sources suggest it was likely Pott's disease,
which is a form of tuberculosis affecting the
spine, or possibly ankle -losing spondylitis.
Whatever the specific diagnosis, the result was
a severe curvature. He became a hunchback. And
it stunted his growth. Yes. He stopped growing.
He was only about 4 foot 8 inches tall as an
adult. His eyesight began to fail from the constant
strain of reading tiny print in bad light. He
developed chronic gastrointestinal problems.
It's so important to sit with this image. He
is a teenager with a mind of genius, trapped
in a body that is visibly deformed and constantly
excruciatingly painful. And his father, Manaldo.
He was proud of this, wasn't he? In a way. In
the worst possible way. He didn't seem to see
the cost. He would hold public exams to show
off Giacomo like a circus pony. Look at my brilliant
son. He can translate Hebrew on the spot. But
he completely ignored the fact that the mad studies
were destroying the boy. It's heartbreaking.
Giacomo writes about looking out the library
window at the village kids playing in the square
and feeling like a ghost haunting his own life.
That isolation is key. He wasn't just lonely
in a social sense. He was severed from normal
human experience. He never had a childhood. Which
probably explains why he tried to escape. In
1818, right? He did. It was a pretty pathetic
attempt, honestly. He planned a runaway attempt
at age 20. He managed to secretly obtain a passport.
He wrote a letter to his father explaining why
he had to leave. But Manaldo found out. And he
was caught. He was caught! It's a humiliating
moment. Here's a man who is intellectually miles
ahead of his parents. He's already corresponding
with some of the top minds in Europe. But in
his own house, he's treated like a naughty child
who tried to steal a cookie. His father literally
intercepts him. But you mentioned he was corresponding
with people. There was a friendship that started
around this time that was just crucial for him.
Yes, Pietro Giordani, a very important figure.
He was a famous classicist and writer who visited
the Leopardi estate in 1817. And Giordani was
the first person to look at Giacomo and see a
peer. Not a freak, not a child prodigy, but an
intellectual equal. That must have been like
oxygen to him. It was a lifeline. Giordani told
him, you are brilliant. There is a whole world
out there waiting for you. You can't stay in
Ricconati forever. He offered him hope. But that
hope has a dark side, doesn't it? It does, because
ironically, it also made the cage feel smaller.
Once you know what's outside, the walls feel
that much closer. And right around this time,
roughly 1816 to 1819, Leopardi undergoes this
massive internal change. Scholars call it the
shift. So previously he was doing this philology,
studying words, history, facts. He was an erudite.
What happens in the shift? He moves from erudition
to beauty. He stops being just a scholar of ancient
texts and decides to become what he was always
meant to be, a poet. But it's not just a career
change. It's a profound spiritual crisis. Because
he loses his faith, right? The rigid Catholicism
of his mother? Completely. He abandons it. He
starts looking at the world through a much colder,
more scientific, materialistic lens, heavily
influenced by empiricist philosophers like John
Locke. He starts looking for comfort in faith
and starts staring at what he calls the arid
truth. La rida vera. The arid truth. But, and
this is the weird part, the beautiful paradox.
This is also when he writes one of the most sublime
poems ever written, L 'Infinito, The Infinite.
Written around 1819, it is a tiny poem, just
15 lines in the original Italian, but it contains
the seed of his entire philosophy. It's a universe
in a grain of sand. Let's visualize it for the
listener because the setting is so important.
The speaker is sitting on a solitary hill in
Reconati. It's a real place, Mount Tabor. He's
looking out at the view, but there is a hedge.
A simple row of bushes blocking the horizon.
Now, hold on. Most of us, if we went to a scenic
viewpoint and there was a hedge blocking the
view, we'd be annoyed. We'd try to find a better
spot, right? Yeah, I'd move. Leopardi does something
brilliant here. He says that the hedge is essential
because it blocks his physical sight. It forces
his mind to work. It forces him to imagine. He
writes, but sitting and watching, I imagine in
my thought, spaces without limits. Exactly. If
he could see the actual horizon, it would be
a specific, finite landscape. It would end somewhere.
But because he can't see it, he constructs the
infinite in his head. The infinite isn't a real
place. It's a mental construct born from limitation.
So the limitation, the hedge, is what triggers
the imagination. It's the catalyst. And then
the wind picks up. He hears the wind rustling
in the leaves nearby. And he compares that finite
present sound to the infinite silence of eternity
of past and future ages. And the clash between
the finite sound of the wind and the imagined
infinite silence of eternity just overwhelms
him. But he loves it, the famous last lines.
And shipwreck seems sweet to me in this sea.
The sweet shipwreck. It's the dissolution of
the self, the ego. For a brief, blissful moment,
the pain of being Giacomo Leopardi, the hunchback,
the prisoner, the lonely young man disappears.
It's annihilated in the vastness of his own imagination.
It's a moment of transcendence achieved not through
faith, but through poetry. This connects directly
to his theory of pleasure, doesn't it? We need
to unpack this because I feel like this is the
engine of his whole worldview. It absolutely
is. And to understand it, we have to look at
the Zibaldone. The Zibaldone. Let's pause and
explain what this thing is because notebook doesn't
quite do it justice. No, notebook is way too
small a word. The Zibaldone is a monster. It's
over 4 ,500 handwritten pages kept from 1817
to 1832. The word means hodgepodge or a mixture
of things in Italian. And that's exactly what
it is. It's his intellectual laboratory. Perfect
description. He wrote about everything. Philosophy,
linguistics, astronomy, literary criticism, anthropology,
personal memories, cynical aphorisms. It's all
in there. It wasn't meant for publication. It
was him thinking on paper for 15 years. It's
like if you printed out the Internet history
of a depressed genius for 15 years. A genius
who is incredibly, incredibly sharp. And in these
thousands of pages, he works out his theory of
pleasure. Here is the core idea, and it's deceptively
simple. Leopardi argues that the human mind is
structurally designed to desire infinite satisfaction.
Infinite, as in limitless. Infinite, limitless,
undefined, perpetual happiness. That is our default
setting. But... We live in a physical finite
world. And the physical world only offers finite
things. Okay, let's use an example. I desire
a new car. Right. A perfect shiny new car. Right.
You desire the car. And in your head, before
you get it, the idea of the car represents a
huge, vague, potentially infinite happiness.
It's shiny. It smells new. It will change your
life. People will admire you. That desire is
enormous. Okay. Then you buy the car. And for
three days, I love it. It's amazing. And on day
four. It's just my car. And I have to get gas.
And I'm worried about scratching it. The object
itself is finite. It has limits. It gets dirty.
But your desire for happiness was infinite. So
the moment you actually possess the thing, the
gap between what you wanted and what you got
becomes painfully obvious. Leopardi calls this
feeling noia. Not just boredom, but a deep existential
tedium. So we are structurally doomed to be unsatisfied
because we want more than reality can physically
provide. Correct. Reality is small. Desire is
huge. That is the fundamental tragedy of human
consciousness. So what's the solution? I mean,
how do we not go completely crazy? Illusions.
Distance. Vagueness. This is where the hedge
from Linfonito comes back. If a thing is far
away or hidden or indistinct or in the future,
we can project our infinite desire onto it because
we can't see its disappointing, finite edges
yet. This is why anticipation is almost always
better than the event itself. Always. This is
why he loved the ancients, the Greeks and Romans.
He had this whole theory that they were happier
than us. Why? Because they had better stuff?
No, because they had better illusions. They had
myths. They looked at a forest and saw dryads
in the trees. They looked at the sea and saw
Poseidon. Their world was enchanted by imagination.
They didn't know everything. And us moderns?
We are cursed with reason. L 'arido vero, the
arid truth. We have analyzed the world to death.
We know the dryad isn't there. It's just chlorophyll
and bark and photosynthesis. We've stripped the
world of the very illusions that made life bearable.
That is actually a really powerful way to look
at it. It explains why a world of total information
where everything is known is kind of a bummer.
Truth is the enemy of happiness. That is a core
Leo Pardi tenet. And beauty, for him, is almost
always linked to the vague, the indefinite, the
remembered, or the anticipated. So initially
in this early phase of his philosophy, he sees
nature as kind of benevolent. She's a mother
who gave us these illusions to hide the ugly
truth. Here, have a myth about Zeus so you don't
worry about the abyss of death. Precisely. He
calls this his historical pessimism phase. He
thinks... I am unhappy because I am modern. If
I had been born in Sparta in 500 BC, I would
have been happier because I would have had more
illusions. But I have a feeling that doesn't
last. No. That blanket is about to get ripped
away. As we move into part three of our deep
dive, he moves from historical pessimism to something
much darker. Cosmic pessimism. And nature stops
being the nice mom who tells you bedtime stories.
She becomes a monster. Or worse, a machine that
doesn't care if it grinds you up in its gears.
This shift is perfectly captured in his work,
Operate Morali, or Small Moral Works. These are
these brilliant, strange prose dialogues. And
there's this one story in particular, the dialogue
of nature and an Icelander. This is a key text
written in 1824. Imagine a man from Iceland.
He spends his entire life trying to avoid suffering.
He's not asking for much. He's not chasing infinite
pleasure. He just doesn't want to be in pain.
He's the ultimate risk -averse traveler. Totally.
He runs from volcanoes in Iceland. He runs from
storms at sea. He runs from the cold. He figures
I'll go somewhere else where nature is kinder.
He travels all over the world. And where does
he end up? He travels to the interior of Africa
to escape nature's wrath. And there in the middle
of a vast desert, he sees a giant bust, like
a huge terrifying statue that turns out to be
a giant woman. It is nature personified. And
he finally gets to ask the manager a question.
He gets his chance. He unloads on her. He says,
why? Why do you torment us? Why did you create
us if we're just going to suffer? I didn't do
anything to you. Why do you hate me so much?
And nature's response is just absolutely chilling.
She basically yawns. She says, did you think
I did this for you? Ouch. It's a brutal takedown
of human self -importance. She explains that
the universe is a perpetual cycle of production
and destruction. Life, suffering and death are
just necessary parts of the engine. She says,
and this is a paraphrase, the world is not made
for humanity. If destroying the whole human race
would benefit the universal cycle, I would do
it without a second thought. So it's not that
she hates him. No, that would almost be comforting.
Hate implies a relationship. She is completely,
utterly indifferent. He is an ant on a sidewalk.
His happiness, his suffering is all completely
irrelevant to the grand mechanical process. That
is cosmic pessimism. It's not about history or
culture or your personal health. It's about the
fundamental mechanics of the universe. And to
prove the point, the dialogue has this slapstick
horrifying. ending just as the icelander is processing
this that his entire life of suffering means
absolutely nothing what happened two famished
lions show up two famished lions show up and
eat him And the narrator notes, with this cold
scientific precision, that the lions, having
eaten him, were able to live a little bit longer
that day. That is so dark. It's brutal irony.
Or there's an alternative ending that Leopardi
wrote where a sandstorm buries him and he becomes
a perfectly preserved mummy who ends up in a
museum in Europe. Either way, he is consumed
by the system. He becomes an object. So this
is where we move from I am unhappy because I
am sick. which is, you know, personal pessimism,
to we are unhappy because we are modern, which
is historical pessimism, to the final awful stage.
Everyone and everything is unhappy simply because
it is born. Correct. Existence itself is a flaw.
Leopardi argues that unhappiness is the default
state of all living things. Animals, he thinks,
suffer less only because they don't have the
consciousness to reflect on the past or worry
about the future. They just exist in the moment.
We have the curse of thinking about our own suffering.
Okay, hold on. I have to play devil's advocate
here for a second. Isn't this just teenage angst
elevated to a grand philosophy? I didn't ask
to be born. Life sucks. It sounds like something
a goth kid writes in their journal. Is it really
deeper than that? That is the most common criticism.
For 100 years, people dismissed him as exactly
that. The bitter hunchback who hated life because
he couldn't get a date. They said, oh, if he'd
been handsome and healthy, he would have been
an optimist. Right. Fix the bag, fix the philosophy.
But Leopardi anticipated that critique. He wrote
about it in Zabaldone. He argued that his physical
suffering didn't create the truth. It just stripped
away the illusions that healthy people use to
blind themselves to it. He said, my sickness
acted like a magnifying glass. So you say his
pain gave him clarity. Exactly. He believed that
even if he were the most handsome, successful,
wealthy man in Italy, the theory of pleasure
would still hold. He would still get bored. He
would still get old. He would still die. The
void is there for everyone. He just didn't have
the energy or the distractions to look away from
it. That's a fair counterpoint. He's saying,
I'm not the pessimist. You guys are just delusional.
Pretty much. And he's got a point. So he takes
this leaden, heavy philosophy and somehow...
In part four of our story, he transmutes it into
pure gold. We're talking about the great Canty,
his major poems written in his maturity. This
is the period roughly between 1823 and 1832.
He actually manages to leave Ricconotti for a
while. He goes to Florence, Pisa, Bologna, but
the world often disappoints him. It's not the
magical place he read about in books. And eventually,
due to worsening illness and lack of money, he
has to go back to the cage of his father's house.
But the poetry he writes in this period. It's
not angry or bitter. It's heartbreakingly gentle
and full of memory. Let's talk about a Sylvia
to Sylvia. A Sylvia, written in 1828. It's one
of the most famous poems in the Italian language,
for good reason. Sylvia is likely based on a
real person, Teresa Fattorini, the daughter of
the Leopardi family's coachman. She died of tuberculosis
in her late teens. In the poem, Leopardi remembers
her singing at her loom when they were both young.
She represents hope and youth itself. But notice
what the central tragedy is here. It isn't just
that she died. That's sad, of course. But the
real tragedy for Leopardi is that she died before
she lost her illusions. He talks about the appearance
of truth, before the arid truth could show itself.
Right. Sylvia died while she still believed the
future would be wonderful. She died in the springtime
of her life, full of anticipation. Leopardi survived.
He grew up. He lived long enough to learn the
truth that life is suffering and disappointment.
In a way, he envies her. But he also mourns the
fact that nature creates such beautiful potential
only to destroy it. He asks nature, why do you
not keep what you promised? But he knows the
answer by now. Nature never promised anything
in the first place. We just thought she did.
Exactly. It's a poem about the death of hope,
both hers and his. Then there's Il Sabato del
Viraggio, Saturday in the Village. This one resonates
with me so much because it feels so profoundly
psychological. It's a masterclass in observation
and a perfect illustration of his theory of pleasure.
He describes the village preparing for Sunday,
the day of rest. The young girl comes back from
the countryside with a bundle of flowers. The
carpenter is hurrying to finish his work before
the sun sets. Everyone is bustling and happy
on Saturday evening. Why? Because they are looking
forward to the holiday. They are anticipating
the rest, the pleasure. Exactly. Saturday is
a day of hope. But then Sunday comes. And what
does Sunday bring? Boredom and the dread of Monday
morning. Sunday is sad and tedious. The reality
of the holiday never, ever matches the beautiful
expectation of the holiday. So takeaway is, the
expectation of happiness is the only real happiness
we ever actually get. Pleasure is the son of
misery, he writes elsewhere. The only real pleasure
is the temporary absence of pain or the anticipation
of a future joy that will, by definition, disappoint
you when it finally arrives. Man. That hits hard.
But the peak for me, the absolute heavy hitter
in this period, is the canto nocturno de un pastore
errante dell 'Asia, the night song of a wandering
shepherd in Asia. This is perhaps his most profound
philosophical poem. He was inspired by a travelogue
he read about Kyrgyz shepherds in the Asian steppe
who would sit alone with their flocks at night
and, apparently, sing songs to the moon. So he
imagines a shepherd. alone in this vast, empty
landscape. No Reconati, no library, no hedge,
just earth and sky. And the shepherd is talking
to the moon. He asks, what do you do, moon, in
the sky? Tell me, what do you do, silent moon?
The moon here represents nature again, but notice
the difference. It's not a giant, monstrous woman.
It's... The indifferent witness. The moon is
immortal. It's silent. It wanders the same path
forever. It doesn't suffer. It doesn't get bored.
It just watches. And the shepherd is mortal,
tired, and full of questions. He asks the moon,
if life is misfortune, why do we endure it? He
compares the human life cycle to the life of
the moon, and it just seems so pointless. And
then he looks down at his flock of sheep, and
this is the crucial comparison. He envies the
sheep. Why does he envy the sheep? He says, you
rest in the shade and you are calm. I sit in
the shade and I am filled with a spur with anxiety.
The sheep doesn't know it exists in time. It
doesn't know it's going to die. It feels hunger.
It eats. It's happy. It feels tired. It sleeps.
It's content. The man knows. Consciousness is
the curse. Yes. The ability to ask why is the
source of all our unhappiness. And the conclusion
the shepherd reaches after all this questioning.
It's devastatingly bleak. he wonders for a moment
if maybe if he could fly like a bird or wander
like the moon he would be happy but he catches
himself he says perhaps my thought is wandering
from the truth he concludes that for every single
being that is born whether it's in a cradle or
in a den the day of birth is black Birth itself
is a tragedy. Yes, it is the ultimate expression
of that cosmic pessimism for man, for sheep,
for everything that lives. Now, you might think
a guy who believes birth is a tragedy would just
give up on all human connection. He'd just sit
in a room and stare at the wall. But Leopardi
didn't. He was desperate for love. This brings
us to part five. Love, death, and satire. He
fell in love constantly. He had this immense
capacity for feeling, but it was almost always
unrequited. His physical appearance, the hunchback,
the shortness, the shabby clothes made him feel
totally undesirable, especially in the sophisticated
salons he started to frequent. There's a specific
episode in Florence where he falls deeply in
love with a woman named Fanny Targiani. He calls
her Aspasia in his poems after the companion
of Pericles. She was beautiful, charming, intelligent,
socially active. She ran a salon where all the
intellectuals gathered. And Leopardi just projected
all his ideals onto her. He fell in love with
a platonic ideal that he stuck onto Fanny's face.
And Fanny, how did she feel about him? Fanny
was polite. She was flattered. She liked having
a famous genius in her salon, but she wasn't
interested romantically at all. In fact, years
later, she gave his autograph to someone as a
souvenir, like a celebrity trinket. It's not
clear she ever really understood she was the
subject of some of the greatest love poetry in
the Italian language. So when the rejection finally
hits him, when he realizes it's never going to
happen, he writes Esistesso to himself. This
poem is the crash. It is short, brutal, and final.
He stops talking to the moon. He stops talking
to Sylvia. He stops talking to women. He talks
directly to his own heart. He tells his heart
to stop beating. He says, rest forever, my tired
heart. The last cheat is dead. The one I believed
eternal. The last cheat Langano Estremo being
love. Yes. He thought love was the one exception
to the rule of universal suffering. He thought
love was the one thing that was real that could
save him. Now he sees that even love is an illusion,
a biological trick to keep the species going.
He concludes with that famous line, and the infinite
vanity of the whole. Meaning everything is pointless.
Everything. The politics, the poetry, the struggle,
the desire. It's all vanity. It's a declaration
of emotional death. But, and here's where it
gets really interesting. He doesn't just wallow.
After the crash, he gets angry. And he gets funny.
Sarcastically funny. People often forget Leopardi
was a brilliant satirist. He wrote this very
strange, very long poem called Peralupomeni della
Batracomio Macia. Which is a mouthful. It translates
to The Things Left Out of the War of the Frogs
and Mice. It's a mock epic. A sequel to an ancient
Greek parody of Homer. Okay, so mice and crabs.
Explain this to me because this sounds like a
fever dream. You have to understand the political
context of the 1830s. Italy is partly occupied
by Austria. The Italian liberals, the revolutionaries
of the Risorgimento, want to unite Italy and
bring in a modern liberal democracy. Leopardi
casts the liberals as mice. Why mice? Because
they are noisy, they scurry around with big ideas,
they are full of revolutionary fervor, but they
are ultimately small, weak, and powerless against
the crabs. The crabs represent the Austrians.
And why crabs? Because they are armored, slow,
they move sideways, and they are brutally effective.
But here is the kicker. He isn't just making
fun of the Austrian oppressors. He is mocking
the mice, the Italian liberals, even more viciously.
Wait, isn't he Italian? Shouldn't he be on the
side of the liberals? You'd think so. Most romantics
were. But Leo Pardi despised the naive optimism
of the liberals. This was the 19th century, the
century of progress with a capital P. People
genuinely believe that steam engines, constitutions,
democracy, and the printing press were going
to solve human unhappiness forever. They thought
they were building a utopia on Earth. And Leopardi
looks at all this excitement and says, He says,
you are all delusional. Imagine you were on the
Titanic and the ship has hit the iceberg. The
water is rising. That is the human condition.
Mortality, suffering, the indifference of nature.
The mice are running around arguing about electing
a new captain or rearranging the deck chairs.
Lee parties the guy standing in the corner screaming,
the ship is sinking. Who cares about the chairs?
So he thought political progress was just another
hedge, another illusion to distract us from the
arid truth. The biggest illusion of them all.
He believed that even if you have a perfect democracy
and a steam engine in every house, you are still
going to get old, you are still going to die,
and your heart is still going to be broken, and
you are still going to be bored on a Sunday afternoon.
A steam engine doesn't fill the void in the soul.
He despised the arrogance of his century. He
called it the century of tall tales. He thought
it was smug and childish. So he's dismantled
religion, nature. love, and politics. He has
stripped the house down to the bare studs. What
on earth is left? That brings us to the final
chapter, the final stance. It's unexpected, and
it's beautiful. In the 1830s, Leopardi moves
to Naples. He goes with his best friend, Antonio
Ranieri. We should spend a moment on Ranieri.
He was a handsome, dashing, somewhat unreliable
Neapolitan exile. But he became Leopardi's devoted
caretaker and constant companion in his final
years. The sources mention there is some academic
debate about the nature of this relationship.
There is. They lived together for seven years.
Ranieri's sister, Paulina, lived with them, too,
as a sort of chaperone. Leopardi wrote letters
to Ranieri that are incredibly intimate, calling
him my soul, my everything. Whether the relationship
was sexual is debated by scholars and we'll likely
never know for sure, but emotionally. Ranieri
was the love of his life. He was the rock that
allowed him to keep writing. So they are in Naples.
And Naples is noisy, chaotic, full of life, everything
Leopardi usually hates. But they eventually move
to a villa on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Living
on an active volcano, it is the perfect, most
potent setting for his final philosophical stand.
And here, in 1836, shortly before he dies, he
writes his poetic testament, La Ginestra, The
Broom. The broom refers to the genestra, a small,
humble yellow flower that grows tenaciously on
the solidified, barren lava fields of Vesuvius.
I love this image so much. You have the black,
desolate, dead lava. That's the arid truth. That's
destruction. That's indifferent nature. And then
you have this tiny, stubborn, fragrant yellow
flower just growing out of it. And this flower
becomes Leopardi's model for how human beings
ought to live. How so? Is it about hope? Is the
flower a symbol of rebirth? No. That would be
too simple, too optimistic for him. It's about
dignity. The flower isn't arrogant. It doesn't
believe it's immortal or that it can defeat the
volcano. It knows the lava could come back tomorrow
and incinerate it. It doesn't beg the volcano
for mercy and it doesn't foolishly pretend the
volcano isn't there. It just persists. It offers
its sweet scent to the desert to console the
lonely traveler. And in this poem, Leopardi offers
a solution to the problem of existence. And it's
not God and it's not progress. Solidarity. This
is the social chain, and this is the most important
part of the entire deep dive. He says, look,
nature is our common enemy. The universe is indifferent
and cruel. We are all soldiers in an army fighting
a war against mortality that we are guaranteed
to lose. So why on earth are we fighting each
other? Exactly. If we are all on the same sinking
ship, why are we stabbing each other over who
gets the best cabin? He calls for a confederation
of mankind. He says we must stop fighting each
other, stop the wars, the nationalism, the petty
conflicts, and band together. We must hold hands
and comfort each other because there is no other
help coming from the sky. It's us against the
volcano. It is. It was what you could call a
heroic pessimism. We fight the darkness not by
pretending it's light, but by lighting a candle
for the person standing next to us. It's an alliance
of the victims against the executioner. That
is surprisingly... Warm and deeply moving for
a guy who started with a man getting eaten by
lions. It is. It's a secular humanism born out
of total despair. It's the radical idea that
because life is fundamentally hard and tragic,
kindness is the only rational response. Leopardi
dies the next year, 1837. During a cholera epidemic
in Naples. He was only 38 years old. His heart
or his lungs, his fragile body finally just gave
out. He likely died of pulmonary edema or heart
failure. And there's a final, touching twist
with his burial, isn't there? Yes. Because of
the cholera epidemic, there were strict public
health laws. Bodies were being thrown unceremoniously
into mass graves and covered in quicklime. But
Ranieri, faithful Ranieri, fought the authorities.
He likely bribed someone, hid the body, and pulled
strings to get him a proper burial in a church
crypt. Saving him from the anonymity, the oblivion
he feared so much. Saving him from being consumed
by the infinite vanity of the whole. So let's
bring this all home. We called this deep dive
the prisoner of the library. But by the end,
listening to you, he seems like the freest man
in Europe. I think that's right, in a way. He
is the supreme interrogator. He stripped away
every single comfortable illusion. He took away
the comfort of religion, the comfort of progress,
the comfort of romantic love. He showed us the
bare, cold walls of the universe. Which sounds
absolutely terrifying. It is. But there is a
strange, profound dignity in it. He refused to
lie to himself. And in the end, with La Genestra,
he found a way to be kind in a cruel world. He
teaches us that we can look directly at the void
and still choose to hug our friend. So here's
our final thought for you, the listener. Leopardi
spent his entire life dismantling illusions.
He called them hedges, things that block our
view of the terrifying, incomprehensible infinite.
But he also admitted, especially in his early
work, that without those hedges, without those
illusions, we can't survive. Imagination needs
limits. We live in an age where we have torn
down a lot of hedges. We have information overload.
We see the arid truth on our screens every single
day. We know too much about everything. The question
Leopardi leaves us with is this. Can we live
with the unvarnished truth? Or do we need to
start consciously planting our own hedges? Do
we need to cultivate limits? put down the phone,
ignore the 24 -hour news cycle, create a little
mystery in our lives so that our minds have a
space to imagine the infinite again. Maybe the
shipwreck is only sweet if you don't know exactly
how deep and cold the water is. Or maybe, as
his final poem suggests, the sweetness comes
from knowing the ship is going down and turning
to hold the hand of the person next to you anyway.
Something to think about as you look at your
own horizon. Thanks for diving deep with us.
We'll see you next time. Goodbye, everyone.