Giacomo Leopardi, The Letters of Giacomo Leopardi 1817-1837, tr. Prue Shaw (Routledge, 2017), from the 3rd letter, To Pietro Giordani, Milan, 30th April, 1817:
But not having a man of letters to talk to, keeping all one’s thoughts to oneself, not being able to air and discuss one’s opinions, innocently show off one’s studies, ask for help and advice, take heart in the many hours and days of exhaustion and listlessness—do you think all this is a fine diversion? . . .
. . . I see clearly that to be able to continue my studies I must break them off at once and give myself a little to those things they call worldly, but to do this I want a world that entices me and smiles at me, a world that shines, even if it is with a false light, a world strong enough to make me forget for a few moments what is above all close to my heart, not a world that makes me recoil at once, that turns my stomach, enrages me and saddens me and forces me to run back for comfort to the very thing from which I wanted to escape.
. . . how am I to get free of it, if all I do is think and live on thoughts, without a distraction in the world? and how make the effects stop, if the cause continues? What is this talk of distractions? The only distraction in Recanati is study: the only distraction is the thing that is killing me: all the rest is tedium. I know that tedium can do me less harm than exhaustion, and so often I settle for tedium, but this increases my melancholy, as is natural, and when I have had the misfortune of talking to these people, which seldom happens, I go back to my studies full of gloomiest thoughts, and I go brooding and ruminating on that blackest of subjects.
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