The noia of Leopardi
I subscribed to the Poetry Journal earlier in the year, in an attempt to be more familiar with modern poetry (you can read it all online, but what sort of poet reads poetry online I ask you?). That attempt is not always especially rewarding, but November’s issue was interesting, and in the back are some extracts from the daybooks, or Zibaldone di pensieri, of Giacomo Leopardi. Leopardi wrote poems considered among the greatest produced in nineteenth-century Europe, as well as literary, philosophical, and philological essays, edited the classics, and composed a series of imaginary dialogues (you can read all of this, plus what I have quoted below, here).
You have to make allowances for poets and philosophers, and much of the Zibaldone is melancholic abstract ramblings, full of a miserable despair that we’re all simply on our way to a ditch to fall into, and eeking an unattractive superiority and scorn for the masses, but I was rather esoterically interested in his writings about this thing he calls “noia”. Then from noia he rambles into something that sounds a little like CS Lewis’s search after desire, only he’s writing about pleasure. So, here it is, for anything other than your amusement:
Noia is the most sterile of human feelings. It’s the child of spiritual numbness and mother of nothing. It isn’t merely sterile in itself, it renders sterile everything it invades or gets close to, etc.
September 30, 1821
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Uniformity guarantees noia. Uniformity is boredom, boredom uniformity. Uniformity comes in many forms. Endless variety produces uniformity, thus more noia...Constant pleasure, too, is uniformity, therefore boring, though its medium is pleasure. Certain foolish poets, realizing description gives pleasure, reduce poetry to nonstop description: they drain all pleasure from poetry and replace it with boredom...I know non-literary people who avidly read the Aeneid, which you would think could be enjoyed only by the happy few, but who toss aside the Metamorphoses after reading the first book or two even though it offers immediate pleasures. Remember what Homer has Menelaus say: “There is satiety in everything—in sleep, in sweet song,” etc. The constancy of pleasure, even of different sorts of pleasure, or of near- or pseudo-pleasure, this too is uniformity, and therefore noia, and therefore pleasure’s enemy.
August 7, 1822
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Noia is plainly an evil: to suffer it is to suffer utter unhappiness. So what is noia? Not a specific sorrow or pain (noia, the idea and nature of it, excludes the presence of any particular sorrow or pain) but simply ordinary life fully felt, lived in, known; it’s everywhere, it saturates an individual. Life thus is an affliction; and not living, or being less alive (by living a shorter or less intense life) is a reprieve, or at least a lesser affliction—absolutely preferable, that is, to life.
March 8, 1824
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If all you seek from something is pleasure, you’ll never find it. All you will feel is noia, often disgust. To feel pleasure in any act or activity, you have to pursue some end other than pleasure. (This would figure in a Manual of Practical Philosophy.) It happens (I could give a thousand instances) when we’re reading. If you read a book seeking only pleasure (it can be the finest, most delectable book in the world), expect to be bored or turned off by page two. A mathematician, though, loves reading a geometry proof, which you can be sure he’s not reading for pleasure. Maybe this explains why public amusements and entertainments are in themselves, without meliorating circumstances, the most boring, excruciating things in the world. Because their only end is pleasure; pleasure is all that’s wanted and expected. And something from which we expect and demand pleasure (as if it were a debt owed) of course never yields pleasure, it yields the opposite. It’s entirely safe to say that pleasure comes only when least expected, where we’re not looking for it, not hoping for it. That’s why in the ardor of youth, when we pitch all desire and hope toward the pursuit of pleasure, we find in life’s exquisite delights nothing but scary, tortuous disgust. We can’t begin to sample the world’s pleasures until we squelch and cool that impulse, until we turn our backs on pleasure, give up on it. Pleasure, in its way, is like quietude: the more we desire and seek it and nothing else, the less of it we find and enjoy (see what I say in the next entry). The very desire for tranquility excludes and is incompatible with it.
March 31, 1827