Giacomo Leopardi
Canti

LA RECENSIONE

Imagine reviewing your entire life, whether short or long, and searching all those crevices, those folds where the subtle, deadly doubt has crept in that reality is something intimately evil and opposed to your existence.

Anguish wraps around your intestines. Anguish is something intimate, deep, and inescapable; anguish is the feeling you experience when confronted with reality, when illusions fall. It's when you realize that all the lies you've told yourself to feel better, to keep going, to ignore the pain of a moment, are but the broom hiding the dust under the carpet. You've touched one of those boundary-points that you’ve rarely, rarely, very rarely even managed to glimpse. Perhaps in moments of great difficulty, or maybe just one evening observing the moon from your window of your room, reflecting in the late hour, when every hypocrisy falls, and the mind surrenders naked to the reckoning with the conscience.

What infinite sadness lies behind every human relationship. Do you not feel guilty toward your parents? Honestly, have you never felt an incredible sense of DESPERATE emotion toward those who gave you everything, continue to give you everything? Isn't it perhaps the most desperately sad thing that exists?

Life is very fragile. You turn on the television and hear of a boy who died, hit by a car, and you think "oh god, oh god, it could have been me. I'm about to graduate, I have great plans for my life, I'm madly in love with Giulia and I write love poems to her in secret, I've never let her read them, I've sublimated my feelings for her on paper, and I want them to materialize into a relationship, I want children, and I die randomly hit by a drunk. That's it. My dreams die with me." Isn't life very fragile?

How many times have you cast away these thoughts? How many times, when someone mentioned them, have you silenced them jokingly by bringing up the "chicks", about which "it's much better to talk?" How can you be blamed? These are not the discussions suitable for conversation among people; conversation is meant to be cheerful, if you start talking about the harshest aspects of life, it's the end; yet, inside, you empathized with those you silenced, because on the fine line, on the cracked ice of those spoiled yet so lucid thoughts you have walked more and more times...

Or when they explained Leopardi's cosmic pessimism to you—everyone has gone through it—in high school or later, in a university lecture room too crowded to contain everyone, and you’re a freshman with lots of expectations from the Advanced Italian Literature course, even then you agreed with the Poet, you knew he was telling the truth, that he saw things with an eye not more intelligent than yours, but simply: more sincere. Yet, you fled, avoided, ignored, scoffed. That sincerity of his—that HONESTY—has always made the difference between your life, moderately happy, and the murky, aseptic chaos you perceived moving beneath it.

Now you're opening a window, and as you look toward the horizon, you feel a certain peace: the bad thoughts vanish, the harmony of the landscape consoles you

it's only appearance! it's only appearance!

it's as if you lose yourself in that distant line fading into the sky, red down there and gradually darker, until the deep black of the night, speckled here and there with the few stars visible through the veil over Milan.

Ah, the stars. They've always been a spectacle since you were a child, and in your dreams, you flew, dreaming of flying and sometimes, among your most idiotic and childish thoughts, that desire to fly resurfaces, and it's enough to look up, toward Orion's Belt or that kind of w or m that is Cassiopeia, and you already feel violently pulled upward, and from above, beyond the clouds, in a moment of absolute vertigo, you see how small our world is compared to the vast, dead, indifferent universe. Then the mind yields, and you return with your feet on the ground, this ground made of matter. There's little else in the world.

"Dad, when does a day end?"

"When you can consider yourself satisfied with it."

I'm living a day that began years ago.