Dino, Leopardi and the abyss of boredom

“I cannot touch things. They are there, in front of me, yet they always remain beyond my reach, as if an invisible skin separated them from me. Objects, faces, feelings: everything appears distant, inert. My life flows like a catalogue of aborted attempts. This is why I say that boredom is nothing but a defect of reality”.

This is how Dino, the protagonist of Boredom, might write. In him, boredom is neither languor nor laziness: it is the very substance of his existence. Art does not open spaces; it becomes a mute canvas. Love does not console; it turns into obsession. His condition reflects a typically existentialist trait: the alienated man who moves through a world he does not recognize as his own, trapped in a reality that remains irreducibly other.

And yet, Leopardi observes the same feeling and grasps an opposite face of it. In the Zibaldone of Thoughts, in his notes from 1820, he writes: “Boredom is, in a certain way, the most sublime of human feelings. Only man is capable of boredom.”

In these reflections, boredom ceases to be a simple lack or an inner emptiness and instead reveals itself as a profoundly human condition, born from the infinite desire for happiness that inhabits human beings and that no earthly pleasure can ever satisfy. It thus becomes the sign of the irreparable distance between the aspiration toward infinity and the limits of reality, bearing witness at once to human greatness — the ability to conceive the absolute — and to human condemnation to unhappiness, since one is forced to confront the insufficiency of every finite experience.

Where Dino perceives only impotence, Leopardi discerns greatness: what for the former is closure, for the latter is vertigo. Dino might have thought: “Sublime? I feel no infinity at all, only the void that devours me”.

And here the knot emerges: boredom is perhaps the most two-faced feeling we know. In Moravia, it is paralysis; in Leopardi, an opening. Two irreconcilable responses to the same abyss.

Thus, the real question is not whether boredom is evil or greatness, defect or vertigo. The true question is what we, today, do with that void that passes through us. Do we allow it to wither, like Dino, or do we transform it into a space of possibility, like Leopardi?