Leopardi, the poet of sorrow, of annihilation, having lost the ultimate
illusion, that of believing in his immortality--
_Peri l'inganno estremo
ch'eterno io mi credei_,
spoke to his heart of _l'infinita vanita del tutto_, and perceived how
close is the kinship between love and death, and how "when love is born
deep down in the heart, simultaneously a languid and weary desire to die
is felt in the breast." The greater part of those who seek death at
their own hand are moved thereto by love; it is the supreme longing for
life, for more life, the longing to prolong and perpetuate life, that
urges them to death, once they are persuaded of the vanity of this
longing.
The problem is tragic and eternal, and the more we seek to escape from
it, the more it thrusts itself upon us. Four-and-twenty centuries ago,
in his dialogue on the immortality of the soul, the serene Plato--but
was he serene?--spoke of the uncertainty of our dream of being immortal
and of the _risk_ that the dream might be vain, and from his own soul
there escaped this profound cry--Glorious is the risk!--_kalos
gar o kindunos_, glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our
souls never dying--a sentence that was the germ of Pascal's famous
argument of the wager.
Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to
eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the
immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression
upon me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is
not with reasons that the heart is appeased.
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