Purpose? No

July 5, 2024 12:18am

Life no longer hurts like it once did. The sensation is deadened.

Amazing that 13 billion years after the origin, sentient beings appeared on this planet. I am one of 100 billion who have existed. I thought this all had a purpose – now I know it never did. Amor fati.

Leopardi

July13, 2024 11:44pm

I am reading about Giacomo Leopardi who is said to be one of the world’s greatest writers. How did his reputation elude me for so long? Leopardi reputedly had a profound understanding of the human condition. He read the classics from an early age and became fluent in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew even though he suffered from poor health his whole life. He wrote essays, poems, and philosophical works and kept a Zibaldone that totaled over 4,000 pages by the time he died at age 38. His health and the restrictions it placed on his activities and opportunities as a youth contributed to his pessimistic outlook.

Schopenhauer regarded Leopardi as a kindred spirit – writing that “everywhere his theme is the mockery and wretchedness of this existence.” – The World as Will and Representation Vol. 2 Ch. 46

So….Leopardi is in the same nihilistic pantheon as Schopenhauer and Nitzsche.

I have ordered the Zibaldone and will have more to say and Leopard later.

Illusion or Deception?

July 14, 2024 7:36am

Memories of memories until who knew what the truth really was?

Rock House and More Leopardi

July 31, 2024 3:50pm

I spent part of the day moving a pile of sand in the stone house footer so I can dig a hole and erect the 17′ pipe that is part of the mechanism I designed to move the 300lb rocks for the fireplace. I finally tested the lifting tool I designed and welded up and which will hang from an I-beam that will be hinged 5′ above the ground on the pipe. The tool successfully grasped and lifted one of the bigger rocks!

The bricklaying on the chimney proceeds slowly around rain and other interruptions. Who knows when I’ll get this 15’x15′ house finished!

Now reading Leopardi’s “Zibaldone” and while there is (so far) almost exclusively, reviews of Italian poets, essays on the Greek and Roman writers, and discussions of the negative impact of reason on man’s relationship with nature, there are some gems that interest me, for example:

“I consider illusions to be in a certain sense real, since they are essential ingredients in the system of human nature, and given by nature to all men, so that it is not right to scorn them as being the dreams of a single man, but better to regard them as a real part of man and willed by nature, without which our life would be the most miserable and barbarous thing, etc. Hence they are necessary and form a substantial part of the composition and order of things.” – Giacomo Leopardi

AND….

“Can it ever be better in absolute terms for a person not to exist than to exist? This would be so if man did not have a future life.” – Leopardi.

I have read that Leopardi’s devotion to his faith as a youth gave way to a more mechanistic view of the universe.