This does not, however, take away death’s sting. For mortals, death brings a darkness, and it is this darkness, and the suffering that precedes it, which is what most interests Fashion. To those who might think—her sister Death included—that Fashion represents an enrichment, an embellishment, a celebration of life, and thereby defiance of Death, she offers a corrective. Fashion points out that she is constantly advancing Death’s cause. She does this, on the one hand, by endangering the health of the living, inducing them, inducing us, to pierce, tattoo, bind and bend our bodies in accord with her caprices. Death acknowledges this, but wonders whether her sister might not be doing more. Fashion, who is quicker than her sister, says that Death hasn’t been paying attention; that she, Fashion, already does much more, and something much more fundamental. Fashion not only physically weakens the living, she performs the more important service of emotionally and intellectually weakening mankind. Her whirling dictates see to it that life itself is impoverished to the point that, so says Fashion, all halfway intelligent men and women now despise life, and long for nothing so much as its end. Fashion tells her sister that whereas Death was often reviled in antiquity, now it is held in the highest esteem among the intelligent. What more could Death ask for?

II.

Death and its desirability is not simply one idea among others in Leopardi’s book, or his work. It is the idea, and so it is not only the one with which he ends his Operette morali, it also has a special place in his poetry. Despite his wide learning (the result of a precocious studio matto e disperatissimo, “a mad and most desperate study”) and diverse writings, Leopardi is most famous as a poet, and his most famous poem is a sonnet addressed to himself in which he denounces and deplores what he calls, in its final line, “the infinite vanity of everything.” One day while whistling his way around the Lake District, Wordsworth stopped (on a bridge) to write of “the burthen of the mystery” formed by “the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world.” For Leopardi, if the world was unintelligible, there was no mystery in this, only burden. We were given a single gift and this gift is named elsewhere in “To Oneself”: “To mankind / Fate’s only gift is death.”

The message—in dialogues and poems—is then simple (and haunting) enough. The world is a dreadful place, truly dreadful. It is not accidentally or superficially or contingently dreadful. It is essentially dreadful. It is screamingly dreadful. And as though dreadful were not enough, it is getting worse. Which leaves a single relief: death.