Reality wears many faces. Although I see it differently from Leopardi, rather as a diseased tree bearing poisonous fruit than a singing girl, the effect is the same. We are seeing the same thing. The void. The unbearable pain of existence against which all we can do is wail out in the wilderness, bereft even of the hope that we will be heard.
Which is my characteristically melodramatic way of saying, although I cannot relate to the specific triggers of Leopardi's existential angst--frustrated love, life in a dissolute world that shames the glories of the past, imprisonment in a body that will never do me credit . . . oh. Yes, I see now. Oh my.
Mercifully, it is not only this despair that Leopardi and I share. Like so many who face the void, we both can see something inside of it. There is peace to be had, as he says, in helping others, in seeing our place, in drifting anonymously in a meaningless sea, and, although he mentions it surprisingly little, there is also peace to be had in writing something wonderfully melodramatic and throwing it to the wind.
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