At Leopardi’s House
Tim Parks · The Times Literary Supplement
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Summary
Tim Parks uses a visit to Giacomo Leopardi’s house in Recanati to examine what happens when writers lose faith in their community of readers. Leopardi’s pursuit of truth led him from youthful scholarship to a bleak view of existence, yet he believed people still required consciously cultivated illusions, including his own hope for literary glory. Repeated disappointments persuaded him that original literature is recognized by only a tiny minority and that posterity offers no reliable consolation, a predicament Parks connects to other alienated authors and to the erosion of a shared vision between writers and readers. Recanati’s largely superficial commemoration of Leopardi sharpens the irony, while his imagined robotic companion prompts Parks’s closing suggestion that neglected writers may seek appreciative readers in AI.
Highlights
- Spurred by his father’s Christian rationalism, and already able to read Latin and Greek, German and French, English and Hebrew, the teenage Leopardi embarked on the huge Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients (1815). But his use of modern science to deconstruct ancient creeds only prompted the consideration that Christianity was equally flawed. Existence, he concluded, was “a solid nothing”. Distressed that the pursuit of truth had merely made life more difficult, he turned to poetry and quickly became Italy’s most sublime bearer of ill tidings.
- In fact, Silvia, who died too young to realize how “nature tricks us with promises it will not keep”, is emblematic of Leopardi’s loss of hope.
- A later fable he wrote about a man who refused to subscribe to the community’s shared illusions begins: “Filippo Ottonieri … lived most of his life, in Nubiana … where there is no memory of his ever having injured anyone, in word or deed. He was generally hated by his fellow citizens …”. But nobody, Leopardi believed, could live without illusions of some kind. The trick was to cultivate them, knowing they were no more than that.
- In Rome, the writers he met only “took away any desire to meet others. They all suppose they can drive to immortality in their carriages”.
- “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter”, declared Herman Melville, despairing at the reception of Moby-Dick.
- Yet none of those visiting the house with us seemed to have more than a classroom memory of him. “Some even think he was atheist”, says our guide timidly. Utterly godless, in 1833, Leopardi gave up his attempts to penetrate literary society, retreating with a friend to an obscure life in Naples where his greatest pleasure was the local ice- cream.
- Worst comes to worst, disillusioned writers might turn to AI to have their work appreciatively read.
Source
- Author
- Tim Parks
- Publication
- The Times Literary Supplement
- Date
- August 7, 2026