A work of genius: it makes us sensitive to the nothingness of things

"And the spectacle of nothingness is itself a thing in these works, and seems to enlarge the reader’s soul, to raise it up and to make it take satisfaction in itself and its despair. (A great thing, and sure mother of pleasure and enthusiasm, and magisterial effect of poetry when it succeeds in enhancing the reader’s concept of himself, and of his misfortunes, and of his own dejection and annihilation of spirit.)1 In addition, [261] the feeling of nothingness is the feeling of something dead and deathly. But when this feeling is vivid, as in the case I am describing, its vividness prevails in the reader’s mind over the nothingness of the thing that it makes him feel, and the soul receives life (if only fleetingly) from the very force with which it feels the perpetual death of things, and its own death. For no small effect of knowing the great nothing, and no less painful, is the indifference and insensibility that it very commonly inspires, and must naturally inspire, toward nothingness itself. This indifference and insensibility is removed by the reading or contemplation of a work of genius: it makes us sensitive to the nothingness of things, and this is the main cause of the phenomenon I have discussed. I will note that it is much more difficult to experience this phenomenon in the dark and gloomy poems of the north, especially the modern sort like Lord Byron’s, than in southern poems, which retain a measure of light in their most somber, painful, and desperate themes. Reading Petrarch, e.g., his Triumphs, or the meeting of Achilles and Priam, and I will also add Werther, produces this effect much more than The Giaour or The Corsair,1 etc., despite the fact that they treat and demonstrate the same human unhappiness, and the vanity of everything. (4 Oct. 1820.) I know that when I read Werther, I was heated in my despair. Reading Byron, I was left completely cold and devoid of enthusiasm, let alone consolation. [262] And Lord Byron certainly didn’t make me any more sensitive to my desperation: if anything, he probably made me more insensitive and stone-cold than before."

(from "Zibaldone" by Giacomo Leopardi, )