Weekly Authors— Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi is known as a remarkable poet and essayist of the period of Romanticism (which is roughly 18th and 19th century time interval, from the relative perspective, as if nothing happened).

I read his work Passions which quite reminded me of Pascale’s Thoughts, even though Leopardi himself has the exact same work Pensieri. That does not matter now, however.

In Passions, Leopardi describes interhuman relations and some sort of wilderness emerging from ditto when certain requirements of a single triegoidal creature are not satisfied. It seemed fun, nevertheless, to read a work of a grown man who in spite of his age, is still able to romanticise the world. Perhaps, I am a deviant human being — you might come in agreement with me by the time you’ll have finished reading this work.

I would fancy listing the favourite quotes I collected from this book so you can think about them more (in attoseconds) than I did.

• Weakness is attractive
• Even the strongest people are made fearful by hope
• When the God decides to destroy a successful man, he deranges his mind so that everything that goes wrong seems more than what he deserved and hence bad luck turns into guilt
• We are desiring and hoping for what we cannot mentally conceive

I must admit, the one with bad luck approaching guilt as n approaches infinity (limit humor) had me thinking… Furthermore, it is an indirect implication of the quote I mentioned beforehand, that even the strongest ones are made fearful by hope.

I would say that is the ultimate mechanism by which most religions function and are still alive to this day. Fearing this and that, sacrificing the nowness in order to feed the hope and ultimate fetishization of itself. I wonder how these romanticist authors, following the steps of our ancestors to the carpets of fear, had not back then noticed how much of a phantasmagoria they invested in order to make the fear of the now as magnificent as possible.