The Excluded Gaze, from Leopardi to Byung-Chul Han

For lovers of diaristic, fragmentary writing, few experiences can match the act of losing oneself—and, inevitably, finding oneself again—in the pages of the Zibaldone. It is far too compelling – and, I dare say, hilarious – to wander amongst these notes and fragments, some of which are utterly curious, at times at length and at others merely hinted at, sometimes dazzling, and undeniably captivating in their ability to transport the reader to Leopardi’s desk, into the concreteness of specific moments, into his thoughts and observations. Here, the observation: ‘In autumn,’ we read at one point, ‘it seems as though the sun and objects are of a different colour, the clouds of a different shape, the air of a different flavour. It seems absolutely as though the whole of nature takes on (…) a character all its own in this season’. In this evocation of the onset of autumn, one can discern an invitation to rediscover the richness of an experience that, in our age, appears increasingly fragile: that of simply observing. It is a dimension often taken for granted, yet widely recognised as a half-open door to unexpected treasures and – to cite one voice amongst many – identified by Umberto Saba as the very foundation of poetry itself: “I sit by the window and watch. / I watch and listen. Yet in this lies all / my strength: to watch and listen”. Simple and evocative, yet how far removed from ordinary life: when a moment of quiet arises, the mind wanders, becomes crowded with a thousand thoughts, is reluctant to linger on bare observation (“If our life were an eternal sitting by the window”, wrote Fernando Pessoa), and at times even tends to avoid a silence that can prove uncomfortable. Rediscovering the charm of a relationship with reality based not on the functional dimension, but on pure observation, is by no means a foregone conclusion, even if the contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in one of his writings (Non-Things. How We Have Stopped Experiencing Reality, Einaudi, 2022) notes that “today, things are increasingly receding into the background of our attention, (…) we no longer perceive them in their otherness or strangeness. In this way, our sense of reality is weakened”.

In short, we live in an age in which taking the time to reflect on things – what Simone Weil described as ‘feeling the existence of the world with one’s whole being’ – is a revolutionary act: perhaps we can learn something from children, who experience the world first and foremost through their eyes, and thus discover that, as the explorer Erling Kagge notes in a fascinating book (Walking: A Subversive Act, Einaudi, 2018), ‘when I look around, I see things of value everywhere’ or, similarly, allow ourselves to be struck by Franco Arminio’s evocative insight: ‘I look at everything as if it were beautiful. And if it isn’t, it means I must look more closely’ (The Care of the Gaze, Bompiani, 2020).

It is an awareness that surfaces repeatedly in the writings of great authors and is described by Cesare Pavese in Dialogues with Leucò: “We know that the surest – and quickest – way to amaze ourselves is to gaze unflinchingly at the very same object. At some point, this object will seem to us – miraculously – as though we had never seen it before”. The unexpected sense of wonder at what we might call the ordinary is the secret voice of a reality that shines most brightly when all is silent. It is at this level – at once elementary and profound – that we discover how silence, the supreme form of respect in the face of being, is at times far more eloquent than words, as the Catalan poet Joan Maragall illustrates in a brief anecdote: During a walk by the sea, he observed that those approaching the horizon, overcome by unexpected wonder, suddenly fell silent: “Two silent sailors came along; they stood before the vast coastline and remained silent for quite some time, side by side. Then one of them, without moving or turning towards his friend, said: ‘Look’.” Maragall comments: “Everything else is just empty talk.”