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Life Is a Prison. The chief conclusion Leopardi had drawn from his classical studies was that hope and love were nothing but fleeting "illusions." Man, he believed, was doomed to struggle through a wretched life until death released him. Leopardi would have liked to speed things up by throwing himself down the garden well, but he was convinced that life and death had conspired to prevent this by making certain that he would "climb up onto the rim again, as soon as I reached the surface" and even "feel some . . . pleasure at having saved myself."
The result of this belief was that when at last Leopardi escaped from home, he only found himself in a larger jail. Totally unfitted for society of any sort, he was disgusted by everything. "All that exists is evil . . . everything exists only to achieve evil, existence itself is an evil . . . There is no other good than non-existence."
"I need love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life," Leopardi once exclaimed—but only once did he fall seriously in love. Fanny Targioni was a lively married woman with a large family and four lovers. Her only interest in il mio gobbetto (my little hunchback) was to get him to persuade his best friend to become her fifth. Years later, when Leopardi was long dead and Fanny an old crone, a romantic girl asked her how it could have been possible for her not to love so great a poet. Fanny's answer was very brief: "My dear, he stank."
Sounds of Evening. Fanny's brutal verdict takes some refuting, and it is a tribute to Author Origo that she follows both the man and the poet to the end with unfailing patience and sympathy. For some years longer, Leopardi took a sort of double pleasure in yearning for death and insisting simultaneously that it was too much to hope for. ("My organism," he once said, "has not enough strength left to contract a mortal illness.")
Leopardi had his way at last at the age of only 38, when his "eyes, digestion, kidneys, lungs, heart" joined in an unconditional surrender. Philosopher Schopenhauer hailed the dead man as the prime exponent of "the irony and misery of our existence," but Benedetto Croce has since pointed out firmly that Leopardi cannot be regarded as a philosopher because his views were "not philosophical concepts, but states of mind, born of personal disillusionment and despair." The greatness of Leopardi lies simply and solely in his painfully precise, almost untranslatable poems. Faint whiffs of the stuff of which they are made may be caught from Leopardi's notebooks, wherein countless commonplaces of everyday life may be seen in the process of being captured by the prisoner at his window.