Some Meditations on Landscape & The Infinite…

From Leopardi:

“…at times the spirit…desires a view which is in certain ways restricted and confined… The reason is …the desire for the infinite, because in those circumstances the imagination goes to work instead of the eyesight, and fantasy takes the place of what is real.  the spirit imagines for itself what it cannot see, what that tree, that hedge, that tower hides from it, and goes wandering in an imaginary space, and pictures things it would not be able to if its sight extended everywhere, because the real would exclude the imaginary.  Hence the pleasure which I always used to experience as a child, and do even now, in seeing the sky etc. through a window, a doorway…”  (Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone p. 175, tran. in The Canti by J.G. Nichols)

“Concerning the impressions which please solely on account of their indefiniteness, you can see my idyll on the infinite, and recall the notions of a stretch of countryside which slopes down so steeply that from a certain distance the sight does not extend to the valley; and the notion of a row Continue reading →