These are the very qualities that make him a descendant of both Pascal (whom Leopardi cites as early as Z 383), and of the great French moralists, with whom he shares his enthusiasm for the “character portrait” and the synthetic form of the pensée or maxime. We might say that a maxim is a thought that does not express a general law in abstract terms, but rather, synthesizes experience under the form of a rule; the constancy of the rule has been deduced from repeated experiences. We should read the maxims that run throughout the Zibaldone in these terms, above all in the reflections that open or close many entries; some of these will be reworked and gathered together in Leopardi’s posthumous small book Pensieri.

The diaristic and fragmentary form of the Zibaldone is in no way accessory to it; indeed, it is structurally necessary. The form reveals to what extent thought is dependent on the passage of time, both natural and existential, and how it is marked by the seasons and by the recurrence of public and private rituals—those events full of meaning in which, according to Walter Benjamin, the duration of human experience is crystallized. Significantly, Leopardi almost never registers the facts and events of daily life; rather, he concentrates completely on the sphere of perception and mental states. Thus his diary can be nothing other than the inscription of how the self perceives and reflects both the external world and its own interiority within the flow of time (Z 1376–77). Like the Romantics, Leopardi was aware of the distance between the élan vital of the ancients, absolutely natural and completely directed toward the external, and its modern version, oriented toward the internal (Z 76, 3938).

In fact, Leopardi actually did entitle one of his many autobiographical projects “The history of a human soul.” However, unlike many Romantics, Leopardi experienced this anthropological shift toward interiority as a decline; and perhaps it is because of this that we have only fragments of his many autobiographical projects. By contrast, the extensive length of the manuscript of the Zibaldone made it possible for Leopardi to clothe his thoughts in linguistic flesh and blood (Z 1657), almost crystallizing, as it were, its vital energy. These “thoughts” (the full title is precisely Zibaldone of Thoughts: see Z 4295) are at one and the same time the pulsations that the interior life transmits to the movement of the pen and the traces that are left behind on the paper. Gradually, as the ink dries, these are transformed into archaeological residues or fossils of a provisional state of the soul (self) that the future self will grasp as other than the self, at times not even recognizing the self in them (Z 1766–67, 2488).

For Leopardi, as for the other Romantic autobiographers, the continuity of time is no longer taken for granted; this intuition later becomes paramount for Proust, and we can already discern the seeds of a theory of involuntary memory in the Zibaldone (Z 185, 1455, 1733). Leopardi states that “good memory and discernment and attention” (Z 1766) are required in order to reconstruct the broken threads of a subjectivity that needs to be rediscovered with each and every encounter with the self and with others. One of his unrealized autobiographical projects of 1829 was entitled precisely “Colloquia with my former self, my ancient self, and my new self: that is to say, with what I was and what I am now.” Imitation and self-expression intertwine and overlap (Z 1254–55, 1697–98, 2184–86, 3941–42): the self can no longer be grasped except by approximation and by comparisons with a now lost origin. This in turn gives rise to a type of writing that grows by slow and successive stratifications, almost organically, page by page, and above all at the margins of the manuscript, with continual internal references that seek to connect the “former self” with the “new self.”

In 1827 Leopardi published, but without great success, the book that he held most dear, the Operette morali. The massive index of the Zibaldone, compiled between the summer and fall of that year, represents an enormous effort, silent and secret, to reach self-understanding—a rereading of the self that produced hundreds of new marginal notes. In that same year, 1827, Leopardi initiated yet another autobiographical project, “Memories of my life,” for which he would have recycled many of the notes that he had provisionally placed in the diary. And we find even more autobiographical traces from 1828 and 1829, the very years that mark the rebirth of his great poetry (“A Silvia,” 1828, and “Le ricordanze,” 1829). This second cycle of autobiographical idilli returns to the earlier themes of memory and hope, but conceived in larger, more universal terms. The year 1828 also marks the poet’s mature reflections on the birth of civilization, on oral culture, and on the poetry of Homer, by way of his study of Vico and the philologist Friedrich August Wolf: a return both to the origins of history and to the origins of the self. But by this date, Leopardi’s once fervent interest in the retrieval of the origins of knowledge exhausts itself; inevitably, the “system” begins to close in upon itself after Leopardi’s acceptance of a purely material world, without any meaning (see “Metaphysics, Theology, Philosophy”).

At this point, Leopardi starts to view the Zibaldone as merely a gigantic storehouse of memories that recall other memories. In this sense, the diary functions precisely like poetry itself. In a note of 1827, the poet states that “recollection” is the faculty that allows modern man, by now irredeemably distanced from his own origins, to return to an “almost” natal source (Z 4286–87). It is important to underscore in this passage the term almost because, as Leopardi already realized in 1821, memory “does not derive immediately from things” but is “a recollection, a repetition, a reechoing or reflection of the old image” (Z 515). For Leopardi, memory is but another image in an infinite process of regression that, as Jacques Derrida will say in reference to Rousseau, cannot exist outside writing itself. In one of the most arresting passages in the Zibaldone, Leopardi describes his own poems as relics (Z 4302). The self, the “I,” does not reside in that which is remembered, but in the very activity of remembering, which alone is able to bring back to life, as does the spirit, the dead letter of the text (Wordsworth, Prelude 8, 428–36). In this sense we can say that the Zibaldone is a completely private text, and that indeed it has only one reader. And so it would have been if a fortunate accident—an exception—had not saved it from destruction and total oblivion.

[FD]

History, Politics, Government

Leopardi’s most systematic account in the Zibaldone of the evolution of human societies, and the political structures that accompany them, runs over thirty-six dense pages (Z 543–79) penned in the space of a week (22–29 January 1821), followed by further reflections written in their immediate aftermath (29–31 January; Z 579–91). Already in this relatively early essay, he works from the premise that man is not a necessarily social animal (later, in October 1823, he will pin down this insight in implicit dialogue with Rousseau’s second Discourse: see Z 3773ff. and, for his direct and indirect access to Rousseau in the early Zibaldone, Z 56, note 3). If in the earliest times individual humans congregated and cooperated, this was for specific purposes, principally that of mutual defense against other animals, including other humans.