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The New York Review of Books, in its October 10^thissue, has a review by Tim Parks Associate Professor of Literature and Translation at IULM University in Milan of Zibaldone, designated as “The Greatest Intellectual Diary of Italian Literature.”

The “diary” is by Giacomo Leopardi and was written in the 1800s, and contains four-and-half thousand pages of thought and rumination by Leopardi which, Parks writes, has the “breadth and depth of thought compared to the work of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.” [Page 28]

Some excerpts from the review (which can be found, in its entirety at NYRB.com) are pertinent to some who visit and comment here:

A conflicted psychological state is posited when one knows, but chooses not to know, because knowledge is neither helpful nor attractive. Given the ever-present danger of disillusionment, denial is the default. [Page 28]

… knowledge does not help us to live; on the contrary it corrodes those happy errors, or illusions … that give life meaning, shifting energy to the mental and rational and away from the physical and instinctive, where, in complicity with illusion, happiness lies. [Page 28]

Thought … can crucify and torment a person. [Page 28]

… if beliefs and illusions foster activity and excitement, which are always a pleasure, the deconstruction of those beliefs leads to inertia and unhappiness. [Page 29]

The Zibaldone … begins to assume the tone of an across-the-board attack on received wisdom, notions of progress, and pieties of every kind. [Page 29]

Leopardi makes a distinction between self-love or self-regard on the one hand and egotism or self-centeredness on the other …

For the person whose self-regard has been undermined by ill health, old age, failure, disillusionment, or a society … which has a poor opinion of itself, retreats into self-centeredness; in trouble or danger, he will defend himself and his own interests at all costs, careless of the destiny of those closest to him. Another’s troubles make no impression on him while another’s success is a motive for envy. [Page 29]

[Leopardi] comes back to questions of envy and compassion … (how much easier it is to feel compassion for a pretty girl rather than an ugly old man) … he delves into the questions of how aesthetic responses alter over the centuries, compelling us to acknowledge the relative nature of … knowledge or judgment. [Page 29]

… the mind finds repose not in knowledge but in everything it cannot know … [Page 30]

… why not interest oneself in the most frivolous things, if life in general [is] meaningless? [Page 30]

We are told that there is no point in speaking of things that cannot be known; that any meaning attributed to life is a product of the imagination and hence precarious and infinitely more so once we become aware of this fact … [Page 30]

Parks goes on, “Merely to list the subjects Leopardi tackles in Zibaldone would more than fill this article. So many of his intuitions look forward to the work of future philosophers, to absurdism and existentialism; again and again the voices of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Wittgenstein, Gadda, Beckett, Bernhard, Cioran, and many others seem to murmur on the page(s).” [Page 30]

So, those of you who think you are thoughtful and intellectual, I suggest a dollop of Leopardi’s “diary.” It may help you realize how little we know and how little we really think.