Giuseppe di Lampedusa's "The Leopard"

(Fair warning: the only relation of the following 600-plus words to Lebanon is tangential. If that is not your cup of tea, feel free to move on)

We all began as something else. Lebanon, of course, was not always the Lebanon we know today. France was not always France. And Italy was only willed into existence in 1860, with the unification of the various kingdoms of the Italian peninsula. The Risorgimento was led by the state of Piedmont, ruled from the northern city of Turin by King Victor Emmanuel II and his Prime Minister Cavour.

It did not occur without bloodshed. In May 1860, the Piedmontese Garibaldi, without Cavour's blessing, sailed to Sicily to capture the southern island from the "Kingdom of the Two Sicilies," comprising Sicily and Naples. The Garibaldini routed the loyalists in Sicily and, gathering momentum and volunteers, swept north and marched into Naples. With the final military defeat of the Bourbon monarchies, the "liberated" kingdoms agreed to join the new Italian state. Italy was born. These are the people and events that Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard tackles.

But the book is broader than 19th century Italian political developments. The Leopard tells the story of the twilight years of the old Sicilian aristocracy, and their eventual replacement by a new liberal, merchant class. The protagonist is Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, who is forced to grapple with the gradual deterioration of his authority and his wealth -- despite losing long ago any ethical attachment to the ancien regime's cause. He is resolutely anti-heroic: "Poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discontent under his Jovelike frown," writes Lampedusa, "watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move toward saving it."

The book's great insight surrounds the constants in revolutionary situations. Lampedusa's Sicily is caught in a constant cycle of decay and regeneration: the old ruling class becomes decadent and anachronistic, and is superseded by a new class -- which is eventually domesticated and corrupted by creature comforts. Old rulers are pushed aside by younger, more vital upstarts. Passion cools into loveless marriages. At the end of all the grand events and lofty sentiments, As the rest of the world moves forward, Sicily remains essentially unaltered.

"In Sicily it doesn't matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of 'doing' at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We're as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we’ve been a colony. I don't say that in complaint; it's our fault. But even so we're worn out and exhausted.

...

"This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even, of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind."

The Leopard reads like an extended obituary -- but what a magnificent funeral. It is a description of a society frozen in place, as the world rushes ahead without it. Lampedusa is solely concerned with his small corner of southern Italy, but may I suggest that there are those in other societies -- perhaps other Mediterranean societies -- which his words could speak to. In a letter describing the characters and setting of his novel, Lampedusa writes, "Sicily is Sicily -- 1860, earlier, forever." For better or worse.