Reading for Pleasure

The PDF of Leopardi’s reader is cluttered, but offers many excellent readings. One in particular caught my eye right away on page 51. When I was in high school, an all boys catholic school, we were taught that religion, of any kind not just Catholicism, was the way in which we answer the question: how can I be happy? Leopardi writes, “You feel a void in your soul because your desires are not satisfied” and further suggests, “the soul is avidly seeking that which cannot be found-that is, an infinity of pleasure, or the fulfilling of an unlimited desire” (Leopardi 50). Catholic school religion teachers agree wholeheartedly with these claims. Theologians recognize that something is off, there is a void, and understand it to be Original Sin. A void that anything from the material world will not be able to fill. Although they believe that the only way to ultimately fill this gap is join our Father in heaven, I think that after reading Leopardi’s writing on pleasure and applying Calvino’s work on classics they would agree that reading classics has the potential for creating a paradox in how we momentarily fill the endless hole in our heat.

Material things will never be able to satisfy us. Leopardi claims, “no [material] pleasure is boundless” (50). In other words, everything dies. Realizing that nothing material can be the source of ultimate happiness, we begin to search for the imaginative. He insists that, “with its properties, the imagination can fashion infinite, nonexistent pleasures” (50). Literature is a huge trigger of imagination, especially classics. Calvino says, “A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers” (5). Something that is never exhausted is infinite. And if imagination is “the prime source of human happiness” (Leopardi 51), a classic is a work that provides infinite happiness. People have been trying to explain what happens when we die, but the truth is that no one knows. We can only hope it to be as good as a complete union between our creator and us: a never-ending, us state beyond bliss and content, a state of sheer ecstasy. But until that day comes (hopefully not for a long while) we can use the unceasing hum of the classics to help fill our hearts.