He says it seems
to him a den where no good or beautiful thing ever comes; he bewails
the common ignorance; in Recanati there is no love for letters, for
the humanizing arts; nobody frequents his father's great library,
nobody buys books, nobody reads the newspapers. Yet this forlorn and
detestable little town has one good thing. It has a preeminently good
Italian accent, better even, he thinks, than the Roman,--which would
be a greater consolation to an Italian than we can well understand.
Nevertheless it was not society, and it did not make his
fellow-townsmen endurable to him. He recoiled from them more and more,
and the solitude in which he lived among his books filled him with a
black melancholy, which he describes as a poison, corroding the life
of body and soul alike. To a friend who tries to reconcile him to
Recanati, he writes: "It is very well to tell me that Plutarch and
Alfieri loved Chaeronea and Asti; they loved them, but they left them;
and so shall I love my native place when I am away from it. Now I say
I hate it because I am in it. To recall the spot where one's childhood
days were passed is dear and sweet; it is a fine saying, 'Here you
were born, and here Providence wills you to stay.' All very fine! Say
to the sick man striving to be well that he is flying in the face of
Providence; tell the poor man struggling to advance himself that he is
defying heaven; bid the Turk beware of baptism, for God has made him a
Turk!" So Leopardi wrote when he was in comparative health and able to
continue his studies.
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