In this thread I will post quotations written by and written

>>25568022
Bump. Tell me more.

Please make me euphoric.

Was he a virgin?

On what Leopardi represents in his poetry

>"Leopardi is the supreme poet of passive, helpless suffering-a writer who constantly reiterated, in verse and prose, his conviction that in human life 'there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.'"
from 'Under the Volcano' by Adam Kirsch


On Leopardi denying the existence of happiness

>"Both in Leopardi's lifetime and since, one of the most common defenses against the inquisition his work represents has been to wonder whether the poet denied the existence of health and happiness simply because both were foreign to him."
from 'Under the Volcano' by Adam Kirsch


On Leopardi's physical deformities and lack of romantic affection

>"Leopardi's deformity and physical pain are unavoidable presences in his work. The hump came from his scoliosis - a curvature of the spine, which began in adolescence and gradually pressed against his lungs and heart. In addition, he suffered from poor eyesight and mysterious nervous maladies. A friend who saw him in the late eighteen-twenties remarked, 'Everything harms him: wind, air, light, every sort of food, rest or movement, work or idleness.' His deformity effectively barred him from having any sort of romantic life, except for the few unrequited loves recorded in his poems, and he probably died a virgin."
from 'Under the Volcano' by Adam Kirsch

So what did he write about his own experiences?

>>25568218
this, I want to hear things he wrote. Not what some chad has to say about him.

Sorry about the delay, a lot of Non-ASCII text needs removing.

On Leopardi's depression

>"Given so many sources of trauma and suffering, perhaps the most remarkable thing about Leopardi is that he was ever happy. By 1817, when he wrote his first letters to Pietro Giordani - a freethinking ex-monk who was his earliest friend and patron - Leopardi was already complaining of 'the stubborn, black, horrendous, barbarous melancholy that wears away and devours me.'"
from 'Under the Volcano' by Adam Kirsch


On the link between human reason and unhappiness

>"In an individual life, the time of happy illusion is childhood; in historical terms, the happiest people were Leopardi's beloved Greeks, who still believed in the gods and in eternal glory. On the other hand, a modern, educated European, who sees the world through the cold lens of reason, is the unhappiest person imaginable."
from 'Under the Volcano' by Adam Kirsch


On the depressing experience of reading his work

>"In this way, Leopardi constructs a metaphysical prison, from which escape is impossible; and reading him sometimes feels like being locked in a cell with him. It is not an experience for the fainthearted. Anyone acquainted with depression will find Leopardi dreadfully plausible: another name for his 'reason' could be depressive lucidity, and his works communicate an apathy and an anhedonia that are almost contagious."
from 'Under the Volcano' by Adam Kirsch

>>25568218
>>25568244
OP here. I have recently ordered one of his few translated works, titled 'Zibaldone'. It's over 1,000 pages long and will take me a long time to read. I will post some of the things he wrote in this thread, thought I hope the secondary material is at least a little interesting.

>>25568288
>a lot of Non-ASCII text needs removing

I wish my non-ASCII remover were still online, but it died because of lack of you all's interest probably, leading to my not logging in to the account and its removal.

From 'The Philosophy of Disenchantment' by Edgar Saltus

On Leopardi's envy of the death

>"'There was a time,' he said, 'when I envied the ignorant and those who thought well of themselves. Today, I envy neither the ignorant nor the wise, neither the great nor the weak; I envy the dead, and I would only change with them'"
p.32


On Leopardi's life as a gradual death

>"It was in this way that Leopardi devastated the palace from whose feats he had been excluded. At every step he had taken he had left some hope behind; he had been dying piecemeal all his life; he was confessedly miserable, and this not alone on account of his poverty and wretched health, but chiefly because of his lack of harmony with the realities of existence."
p.32


On Leopardi's unrequited love and loneliness

>"Against Leopardi, then, the house of love was doubly barred. When he was about nineteen, he watched the usual young girl who lives over the way, and with a naivete which seems exquisitely pathetic he made no sign, but simply watched and loved. The young lady does not appear to have been in any way conscious of the mutely shy adoration which her beauty had fanned into flame, and at any rate paid no attention to the sickly dwarf across the street. She sat very placidly at her window, or else fluttered about the room humming some old-fashioned air. This went on for a year or more, until finally she was carried away in a rumbling coach, to become the willing bride of another"
p.30

On Leopardi's appearance

>"Personally considered, Leopardi was not attractive; he was undersized, slightly deformed, near-sighted, prematurely bald, nervous, and weak; and though physical disadvantages are often disregarded by women, and not infrequently inspire a compassion which, properly tended, may warm into love, yet when the body, weak and inform as was his, incases the strength and lurid vitality of genius, the unlovable monstrosity is complete"
p.29 / 30


On Leopardi's contempt for life

>"He had, as has been intimated, a thorough contempt for life. 'It is,' he said, 'fit but to be despised'"
p.24 / 25

On reasons to live once happiness has faded

>"I take pleasure in analyzing the misery of men and things, and in shivering as I note the sinister and terrible mystery of life. I see very clearly that when passion is extinguished, there subsists in study no other source of pleasure save that of vain curiosity, whose satisfaction, however, is now without a certain charm"
p.18

kirsch is a kike

>>25568321
Well here's hoping the thread lasts long enough for you to post it.

>>25568458
>"Against Leopardi, then, the house of love was doubly barred. When he was about nineteen, he watched the usual young girl who lives over the way, and with a naivete which seems exquisitely pathetic he made no sign, but simply watched and loved. The young lady does not appear to have been in any way conscious of the mutely shy adoration which her beauty had fanned into flame, and at any rate paid no attention to the sickly dwarf across the street. She sat very placidly at her window, or else fluttered about the room humming some old-fashioned air. This went on for a year or more, until finally she was carried away in a rumbling coach, to become the willing bride of another"

Very fitting for this board

On thought as a disease (on Leopardi)

>"As has been seen, he was a lover of solitude; indeed, it would not be an exagerration to say that he was glued to it; and in the isolation which he partly made himself, and which was partly forced upon him, he watched the incubation of thought very much as another might have noted the progress of a disease. A life of this description, even at best, is hardly calculate to awaken much enthusiasm for every-day matters, and it was not long before Leopardi became not only heartily sick of the commonplace aspects of life, but contemptuous, too, of those who lived in broader and more active spheres"
p.17


On the attitudes towards life of various religions and ideologies

>"In brief, then, life to the Christian is a probation, to the Brahmin a burden, to the Buddhist a dream, and to the pessimist a nightmare"
p.35

These are from Leopaldi's personal writings

On self-loathing

>"Just about the strongest inducement to suicide is self-loathing [...] My own first experience with self-hatred provoked me to expose myself to all kinds of danger - to kill myself, in fact. How 'amour propre' works: it prefers death to admitting one's worthlessness. And so: the more egotistical you are, the more strongly and continually you will feel driven to kill yourself."
January 8, 1820


On righteousness

>"Today only a crazy person, or someone mean and cowardly, or weak and wretched, would choose the path of righteousness."
April 23, 1821

On life

>"What is life? The journey of a sick cripple carrying an enormous load on his back across steep mountains and impossibly bleak, barren, unforgiving lands through snow, frost, rain, wind, and scorching heat, walking days and nights on end to arrive at some precipice or ditch into which he's fated to fall."
January 17, 1826

You're the same anon who posted Pessoa quotes a few months ago right?

Good job with these threads anon, I like you.

On advocating a monastic life

>"With society's improvement and civilization's progress, the masses gain and the individual loses - loses strength, value, advancement, and thus happiness, and this is how modernity differs from antiquity. [...] The proper path for mankind's improvement now is the monastic way, the penitential way."
September 5, 1828


On misanthropy and solitude

>"Someone who doesn't spend much time among men usually isn't misanthropic. True misanthropes don't live in isolation, they live in the world. They praise isolation, yes, of course, but they live in the world. If such a man withdraws from the world, his misanthropy dissolves in his solitude."
May 21, 1829


On the need to feel

>"Man naturally loves and desires and needs to feel, whether this be pleasurably, or in any way at all, provided that he feels keenly. Both disagreeable sensation and not feeling at all are total suffering for him. [...]"
April 5, 1824

>>25568763
Yes I am the same person. This thread probably isn't as interesting since I'm using secondary sources primarily, and the quotations I'm posting from Leopardi's own work aren't ones I've taken note of myself unfortunately.

On the smallness of human life

>"No one thing shows the greatness and power of the human intellect or the loftiness and nobility of man more than his ability to know and to understand fully and feel strongly his own smallness. When, in considering the multiplicity of worlds, he feels himself to be an infinitesimal part of a globe which itself is a negligible part of one of the infinite number of systems that go to make up the world, and in considering this is astonished by his own smallness, and in feeling it deeply and regarding it intently, virtually blends into nothing, and it is as if he loses himself in the immensity of things, and finds himself as though lost in the incomprehensible vastness of existence, with this single act of thought he gives the greatest possible proof of the nobility and immense capability of his own mind, which, enclosed in such a small and negligible being, has nonetheless managed to know and understand things so superior to his own nature, and to embrace and contain this same intensity of existence and things in his thought."
August 12 1823


On the meaningfulness of childhood compared to adult life

>"Children find everything in nothing, men find nothing in everything."
[date unknown]

Oh man, I'm so glad my life isn't as shitty as Leopardi's.

Only because I'm not an ugly dwarf, though.

>>25568022
Any more? Or that's it?

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45KB, 500x477px

>>25568022
Thanks and checked.

This guy really was a robot. I like him.

>>25569877
Retard OP wanted to make a thread about a guy he hasn't even read. He should have waited until he read more interesting stuff about him (and anything written by him) before making this stupid thread.

>>25569877
>>25570027
I would post more but I would be relying on secondary literature. I only found out about Leopardi around three weeks ago and haven't had time to read any of his original work yet owing to my wagecuckery. I thought other people here might be encouraged to read him, or be curious to find out more about him. If / when I finish the book of his I ordered I will hopefully post a thread of superior quality.

Leopardi know how shit works
I remember studying his poems and life when I went to high school