On Monday 17 January 2022 we read Dante, Inferno, X, 22-81, 94-114, using Petrocchi’s edition for the Italian text and Allen Mandelbaum’s English translation. Both can be accessed through the Digital Dante project at Columbia University. The session focused on “The new year and the future” and together with Dante we read Giacomo Leopardi’s “Dialogo di un venditore d’almanacchi e un passeggere” [Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-by] and Virginia Woolf’s diary entries of 1 and 18 January 1915.

Dante’s canto X is about the souls of the Epicureans punished in the Inferno, who know the distant future but cannot see the present:

“We see, even as men who are farsighted,
those things,” he said, “that are remote from us;
the Highest Lord allots us that much light.

But when events draw near or are, our minds
are useless; were we not informed by others,
we should know nothing of your human state.

[Listen to this extract in Italian]

This is Farinata degli Uberti speaking, the Ghibelline who, upon hearing Dante’s Tuscan accent, asks him imperiously who his ancestors were. This is how the dialogue between these two Tuscans from opposite parties (Ghibelline and Guelph) starts, but it is soon interrupted by Cavalcanti de’ Cavalcanti, who asks Dante why his son, Guido (Cavalcanti), is not with him:

He looked around me, just as if he longed
to see if I had come with someone else;
but then, his expectation spent, he said

in tears: “If it is your high intellect
that lets you journey here, through this blind prison,
where is my son? Why is he not with you?”

[Listen to this extract in Italian]

Dante hesitates for a moment, enough for Cavalcante to think that his son Guido is dead. Devastated by this thought, Cavalcante collapses, and we don’t see him again.

Farinata’s assurance and Cavalcante’s desperate paternal love make this canto memorable, but the intensity of Dante’s dialogue with them is heightened by their peculiar condition: they see the distant future but ignore the present — unlike Dante, unlike us.

On Monday 17 January 2022 we read Virginia’s Woolf’s diary entries of 1 and 18 January 1915 as part of a session devoted to “The new year and the future”, which also included Giacomo Leopardi’s “Dialogo di un venditore d’almanacchi e di un passeggere” [Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-by] and Dante’s Canto X, 22-81, 94-114.

When and how does a new year begin? On the very first day of the calendar in 1915, Virginia Woolf wrote: “To start this diary rightly, it should begin on the last day of the old year.” Why? Because the day before she had received a letter, and the matter was still unresolved the next morning, when she received another one: “a letter from Mrs Hallett. She said that she had had to dismiss Lily at a moments notice, owing to her misbehaviour. We naturally supposed that a certain kind of misbehaviour was meant; a married gardener, I hazarded. Our speculations made us uncomfortable all day. Now this morning I hear from Lily herself.”

On 18 January, in the afternoon, Virginia and Leonard went out: “This afternoon we went over the houses in Mecklenburgh Sqre; which has led to a long discussion about our future, & a fresh computation of income. The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.”

These two ideas—that the year does not begin on its first day, but on the last day of the previous year; and that the future is dark—seemed interesting to start a new year of readings. In Woolf’s pen, both ideas are entangled in very trivial matters: a servant dismissed, a computation of income. Even if Leonard is there in both cases, next to Virginia and presumably in the same position and on the same level (“We naturally supposed…”, “we went over the houses…”), this—amusing, of course—mix of trivial matters and relevant points for reflection made us recall Paola Masino’s novel Nascita e morte della massaia [Birth and Death of the Housewife], which we read on 10 December 2021, in particular the extract where the protagonist writes:

“Thursday, March 9th. – War has been declared against us. […] If they start distributing food stamps, Zefirina will have such little leeway to cheat on the shopping expenses that it won’t even be worth keeping an eye on her anymore.” Do you know any diary written by a man—whether it is a real private diary written by a male author, or a fictional diary by a male character—that contains such computations? If anything comes to your mind, thanks for letting us know about them.

On Monday 17 January 2022 we read Giacomo Leopardi’s “Dialogo di un venditore d’almanacchi e di un passeggere” [Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-by], written in 1832, taking both the Italian text and the English translation from the bilingual book: Giacomo Leopardi, Operette Morali / Essays and Dialogues, translated, with introduction and notes by Giovanni Cecchetti (Berkeley – Los Angeles – London: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 478-483. We read Leopardi’s dialogue during a session that focused on “The new year and the future”, which included also Virginia Woolf’s diary entries of 1 and 18 January 1915 and Dante’s Canto X, 22-81, 94-114.

This dialogue by Leopardi is an illustration of his philosophy: life is painful, and people can only be happy when they imagine that they will be: therefore, in the future, never in the present. The passer-by asks the peddler whether he would like to live over again; he would, but only if he did not know what awaits him.

“PEDDLER: Any kind [of life], just as God would send it to me, with no other conditions.

PASSER-BY: Any life at random, without knowing anything about it in advance, just as we don’t know anything about the new year?

PEDDLER: Precisely.

PASSER-BY: That’s what I would like too if I were to live all over again; and that’s what everyone would like”.

[Listen to this extract in Italian]

Happiness is only possible in the future, which means that it is, in fact, impossible; the only way we experience it is by imagining it:

“The life that’s beautiful is not the life we know, but the life we don’t know; not the past life, but the future.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian]

In the UK there is a Leopardi Centre at the University of Birmingham, to which we owe the first full English translation of Leopardi’s notebook. In it, you will also find the exposition of the philosophy that the Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-by proposes in a narrative form.

Of this very dialogue, there is a beautiful 10-min film adaptation made by the Italian director Ermanno Olmi in 1954 in a neo-realist style: you can see it HERE

Buona visione!