Once reason is introduced into the world everything little by little, and the more it progresses, becomes ugly, petty, dead, monotonous. (488)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Monthly Archives: November 2014
Leopardi, 18
Man is so fond of praise that, even in relation to things that he thinks are worthless and where he has neither sought nor striven to be praiseworthy, the fact of being praised still gratifies him. Indeed, it will often induce him to try and raise in his own reckoning the worth and reputation of that trifle for which he has been praised, and to persuade himself that it, or the fact of being praiseworthy in relation to it, is by no means trifling in the opinion of others. (361)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Leopardi, 17
Each day we lose something; that is, some illusions, which are all we have, perish or wane. Experience or truth daily deprive us of some portion of our possessions. We do not live except by losing. Man is born rich in everything, and as he grows he gets poorer, until in old age he finds himself with almost nothing. (329)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Hell (Atharava Veda)
Sitting in a stream of blood, eating hair and drinking the water that has washed corpses and wet beards.
Hell (Padma Purana)
They are dragged off, with nooses around their necks, and fall into an awful darkness where they are suffer grief as they are burnt and boiled; eaten by foxes, dogs, carnivorous animals, crows, herons, wolves, tigers, serpents, scorpions, and insects; pricked by thorns, cut by saws, squeezed by machines, dragged around on their knees, and beaten by pestles; oppressed by hunger, thirst, the odor of pus, blood and foul-smelling places. They are also forced to eat various unsavory things: pus, blood, vomit, feces and fetid flesh; and finally roasted in places where heaps of hair, blood, flesh, marrow, bones, and dead bodies are scattered.
Hell (Mahabharata)
It is a path enveloped in thick darkness and covered with moss and hair, muddy with flesh and blood. Bones, body parts and entrails cover the earth, which is thick with worms and insects. The putrid stench of rotting flesh pollutes the air, already filled with bees, gnats, and flies. Grizzly bears, evil spirits with pointed mouths, and birds of prey with iron beaks are everywhere. The place itself is a plain of fine white sand, rocks, and stones of iron, surrounded by a river of boiling water and bordered by blazing fires and inaccessible strongholds. There is also a forest of trees with sharp leaves, like swords and razors, as well as iron jars of boiling oil.
Leopardi, 16
Not even self-love is infinite; it is merely indefinite.
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Leopardi, 15
It is plain that a constitution is simply medicine for a sick body. Which medicine would be alien to that body, and yet the latter could not live without it. So the imperfection of the illness has to be compensated for with another imperfection. And thus the constitution is merely a necessary imperfection of the government, an indispensable evil serving to remedy or obstruct a greater evil, much like a cauterization in an individual suffering from rheumatism. (307)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Leopardi, 14
There is not, nor has there been, nor will there ever be a people, or perhaps an individual, that does not suffer difficulties, cares, and sorrows (and these not few in number or trivial) derived from the nature and intrinsic and innate defects of its government, whatever it has been, is, or may be. (295)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Leopardi, 13
Human pleasure (likewise probably that of every living being, in the order of things as we know them) can be said to lie always in the future, to be only in the future, to consist purely in the future. The act of pleasure, strictly speaking, never takes place. (290)
Leopardi, Giacomo, and Michael Caesar. Zibaldone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.