What is certain and no laughing matter is that existence is an evil for all the parts which make up the universe ... Not only individual men, but the whole human race was and always will be necessarily unhappy. Not only the human race but the whole animal world. Not only animals but all other beings in their way. Not only individuals, but species, genera, realms, spheres, systems, worlds.
Go into a garden of plants, grass, flowers. No matter how lovely it seems. Even in the mildest season of the year. You will not be able to look anywhere and not find suffering. That whole family of vegetation is in a state of souffrance, each in its own way. Here a rose is attacked by the sun, which has given it life; it withers, languishes, wilts. There a lily is sucked cruelly by a bee, in its most sensitive, most life-giving parts. Sweet honey is not produced by industrious, patient, good, virtuous bees without unspeakable torment for those most delicate fibers, without the pitiless massacre of flowerets. That tree is infested by an ant colony, that other one by caterpillars, flies, snails, mosquitoes ... The spectacle of such abundance of life when you first go into this garden lifts your spirits, and that is why you think it is a joyful place. But in truth this life is wretched and unhappy, every garden is like a vast hospital (a place much more deplorable than a cemetery), and if these beings feel, or rather, were to feel, surely not being would be better for them than being.
Giacomo Leopardi
Zibaldone
for the record -- as if there were a record!! -- i would like to say that i find leopardi's attitude toward nature to be just as sentimental and without foundation as the opposed attitude that he is criticizing ... both the idea that nature is "wretched and unhappy" and that nature is "joyful" are human concepts applied to a world that is decidedly not human, and these ideas have no real relationship to what bees and flowers feel about their lives ... either idea can make for pretty good art, but neither says anything at all about nature (whatever that is ...)
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it is probably helpful to remember that the meaning of "hospital" as a place of healing is a modern invention. for most of history, the hospital was where one went to suffer and die. in leopardi's day (1798 - 1837) no one who went into the hospital expected to come back out alive ...
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Wow! Amazing, photo, James. Every garden IS a vast hospital. It's an interesting perspective with a lot of truth to it. (But I have to say, the sad man obviously never owned a dog...I've never seen a happier being in my life than my Great Pyrenees, Cody, who died last year. He literally laughed with joy when fetching a ball...or raising kittens...he weighed 100 lbs. and loved cats...) There is no light without darkness; no yes without no; no tomatoes without pain. I go to my garden for healing, but oh, the suffering: the bugs eating the leaves, the black spot attacking the roses, the lack of rain, too much rain, the need for natural fertilizer, the waiting, the back-breaking bending. Yes, a garden is filled with suffering...but I don't see the suffering, only the joy: the flowers, the tomatoes, the mouth-watering fresh herbs, the moonflower and the moonflower moth. It's akin to the joys and pain of motherhood. Thanks for sharing this. xo
ReplyDeleteMarion: maybe so ... i'm certainly not consistent in my own thinking about this, tending to be pretty romantic about "Nature" ... but i wonder if there is joy (or sorrow) in nature, or if we only very much want there to be? how would we know? do we do a good job of distinguishing how nature is from how we feel about it??
Delete... i would have liked your dog, a lot, i think :-)) ... (perhaps that's me being inconsistent :-)
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you are reading Leopardi??? :-)
ReplyDeletei certainly think as you do about this nature anthropomorphism... but as i was reading i remembered a chinese trick film, a wonderful one, depicting, as if this were the most appropriate thing to show children, small events in the life of a garden, or woods, one insect devouring another, one bird devouring the insect, etc. all so beautifully drawn, as in chinese paintings, and with such an impossible serenity... it was really "this is the way things are and one just has to go with them"-approach, and after the initial shock, i thought that maybe this is what we should all show our children...
and speaking of gardens and ways to view them :-)
ReplyDeletehttp://kyotojournal.org/reviews/the-poetry-of-the-gardens/
Roxana: thank you for the link:-) i think there is secret part of me that is japanese ...
ReplyDeleteno, not reading Leopardi ... i just happened across this quote while reading something else ... i haven't read Leopardi for many years, and then only some of his poetry, never the notebooks (which sound very interesting)
i think we know very little of what "Nature" is, though we have used it as an absolute, a foundation for meaning, like God or History ... i don't think nature means anything, and this is precisely why it is so attractive to me, so essential ... because i don't see myself reflected ...
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how it hinges even on the one word hospital and the historical change of this one word! when i first saw this post in my reader i thought it might be positive. that is how i read hospital, in its new sense. certainly this must be significant when we consider translation, if we might so easily become lost inside our own language.
ReplyDeletebut this is not the meat of it. the meat of it, as you say, is the sentimentalization on either end of the spectrum. this reminds me of how the zealousness of atheism becomes a kind of religion in its own right.
leopardi suggests we are healed in a garden because of the abundance of life which suffuses and then distracts from natural violence. i do not believe this to be the case. rather i believe we receive healing because of the absence of man and the diffusion of self. the natural world is neither interpretation of the word hospital, or is both hospitals, the place of birth, healing and death. the garden is exactly such a place where, in the absence of man, we might shed the toxicity of the capacity for sentimentalization and damnation, our own consciousness, thus we become more pure like the lily, the bee or the wilting rose.
there is more here in this post. much more. i imagine a world where this is posted and reposted and held in the mouth at length until we understand something essential.
xo
erin
erin: it seems that any time we project ourselves onto nature -- whichever sense of the hospital that might be, whether we see nature tending to joy or suffused with misery -- it is a violence, a prefiguration of the environmental threat we sense growing darker around us, here in these days after history ... the ultimate sentimentalization of nature is the belief that we should understand it in terms of human need, even human need for healing and/or spiritual comfort ... we need neither the constructed "mother earth spirituality" of left-wing environmentalism, nor the scientific, technological attitude that exploits the earth as a storehouse of resources ... both are human-centered appropriation ... better would be a sort of agnosticism toward nature, a recognition that we don't know what we don't know, that it isn't for us, that we are, thankfully, temporary and small ...
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