It really was as close to a religious experience as I’ve had without the use of psychedelics, and I don’t think I’ve ever entirely broken free of the spell of that moment. One of Whitman’s more ebullient contemporaries called Leaves of Grass “the Bible of America”, and that seems exactly right to me — it’s less a collection of poems and far more a religious text, a way of modelling the personality and giving full scope to one’s creativity and inner life.

More than I’m really comfortable admitting, I’ve tried to mould myself in the direction suggested by Whitman. To me that means, above all, a few things. It means treating the self as infinite: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” It means regarding the border between oneself and other consciousnesses as permeable: part of the thrill of Leaves of Grass is the whimsical way that Whitman slides into the consciousness of John Paul Jones, Davy Crockett, anybody at all really. And it means an abiding, non-negotiable sense of equality and respect towards all creation: “what is that you express in your eyes,” Whitman writes of oxen, “it seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”

Now that I have passed my Whitman year — “I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin” — I find myself reflecting a little more sombrely on Whitman’s vision and what it means for me. I also find myself asking the tough question — how did he do it? — since his achievement seems so simple and replicable, but no other writer that I’m aware of has ever hit quite the vibration that Whitman did. It’s a question that Whitman invites, and he is at his most teasing about it: “if you want me again look for me under your boot soles,” he writes at the conclusion of “Song of Myself”.

What we can rule out, in terms of explaining Whitman, is genius. I’ve recently read some of Whitman’s early poems, and they’re almost shocking in their banality – “Let glory diadem the mighty dead / Let monuments of brass and marble rise.” A recent cottage industry has emerged — although it might be one grad student who keeps finding all these lost Whitman works — that vastly increases our knowledge of Whitman’s early writing, but every one of these works is conspicuously lacking: none contain what Whitman called the “me myself”. And so when Ralph Waldo Emerson read the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, he wrote to Whitman of his surprise: “I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion.” And as Whitman biographer David S. Reynolds put it 150 years later: “A dull, imitative writer of conventional poetry and pedestrian prose in the 1840s emerged in 1855 as a marvellously innovative, experimental poet.”

There seem to be three tacks to explaining this transformation. The first is on the order of a personal epiphany, “attributed to… a mystical experience he supposedly had in the 1850s or a homosexual coming-out that allegedly liberated his imaginations”, as Reynolds writes before soberly concluding, “in the absence of reliable evidence, such explanations remain unsupported hypotheses”.

Part of what has always so stunned me about Whitman is that he managed to have the epiphanies he did without the aid of psychedelics, but on closer inspection, he, uh, actually might not have been so unaided in his visions. Calamus — the grass-like plant that plays such an important role in Whitman’s writing (a set of his poems is named after it) — turns out to possess psychoactive properties, which was known in Whitman’s time. And Whitman himself was aware of its powers. “It is a medicinal root,” he told his amanuensis in 1891, and in the same conversation appears to be aware of calamus’ ability to induce tripping. At present, calamus is rarely ingested, but looking for trip descriptions of it online, I came across the following:

“Although the effect is very subtle, my senses are more sharpened and my mind is clear… A desire to go outside and take a walk overwhelms me. I put on my shoes and walk naturally towards the forest. Here I enjoy little things that strike me: the beautiful rustling of the leaves, the wind playing with my hair, the smell of the moss. A very peaceful feeling descends over me like a blanket.”

It sounds somehow familiar.

The other piece of folklore about Whitman’s transformation involves his homosexuality, and here I have recourse to a better-documented myth about Whitman. In 1966, an intrepid researcher discovered a robust urban legend in the small Long Island town where a young Whitman had taught. Whitman had been denounced from the pulpit for pederasty, and tarred and feathered. Townspeople recalled that Whitman had “left under a cloud”, and the school would for decades after be locally referred to as the “Sodom School”.

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There are some documentary reasons to doubt the story, but Whitman historians, Reynolds included, take the possibility seriously. If it’s true, and Whitman had experienced public humiliation like that on account of his sexuality, a line like “I celebrate myself” — the opening line of “Song of Myself” — sounds very different. It’s as resilient as it is triumphant, like the light in the tunnel at the end of years of therapy — it comes across as a declaration of radical self-acceptance, overcoming his angry trauma-inflected writing of the 1840s, and speaking exuberantly, at the top of his lungs.

That reading of Whitman puts him in line with the human potential movement, with microdosers and psychoanalysis patients and health nuts. Part of the cache of recently rediscovered Whitman material reveals that he wrote a book-length article series called “Manly Health and Training”, basically a highly florid men’s magazine. Whitman’s longtime boyfriend would recall that “he was an athlete — great, great. I knew him to do wonderful lifting, running, walking”.

The Whitman I’m describing here feels surprisingly contemporary and close-to-home — get in touch with your sexuality, lift some weights, find a hemp shop that sells calamus and you too can write Leaves of Grass. The second tack on Whitman makes him a little more remote. That would be to link him with a particular moment in the development of American national consciousness. Whitman was maybe the most conspicuously patriotic of major poets and he explicitly linked his writing to the expansion of the United States. “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature,” he wrote in the preface to the Leaves of Grass. “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” We can understand this in two ways — one is that American English, in Whitman’s time, was a sort of fresh clay out of which a new literature could be moulded, much as Shakespeare in the 1590s or Pushkin in the 1820s had a sort of first-mover advantage with their respective literary languages. Or we can understand this as meaning that Whitman had a messianic vision distinctive to America — that American democracy and exuberance would produce what Whitman calls “a copious, sane, gigantic offspring”, a living poem replete with “perfect characters and perfect sociologies”.

It is this vision that, for us now, leaves a bitter aftertaste. Of all Whitman’s characterisations, “sane” is the hardest to apply to our particular moment of American history. Whitman did seem to anticipate that his idea of America might be overly optimistic. In the otherwise exuberant Democratic Vistas, he writes: “the United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time.” And it’s that tremendous failure that, in the year of our Whitman 170, I find myself grappling with — that America just failed to achieve its potential, never acquired a real maturity and then, eventually, lost its idealism. Whitman, in the closest he would get to standard-issue political critique, wrote: “the fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me.”

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But it’s the third tack to understanding Whitman which actually may be the most relevant and direct lesson of Whitman’s. What Emerson called “the long foreground” of Whitman’s was mostly journalism and self-publishing. Whitman, who left school at age 11, trained as a printer’s devil. And, throughout his career, he was intimately tied (in a way that very few writers are) to the physical production of his own work. He worked as a typesetter for publications in New York, founded his own newspaper The Long Islander, and for two years was the editor of the well-known Brooklyn Eagle. What he mostly was, though, was a failure. The self-publishing didn’t earn much. His practical-minded brother George would lament that “he made nothing of his chance” during the “great boom in Brooklyn” in the 1850s. And Whitman, who seems to have been living rough as much by necessity as poetic persona, would in 1840 style himself as part of a “loafer kingdom”.

But it was Whitman’s outsiderness — combined with his willingness to take control over the means of production — that accounted for his literary miracle. High-brow American literature in Whitman’s time was awful, really awful — stale hand-me-downs of European prosody — and Whitman, too, struggled to break free of it. “I too, like all others, was born in the vesture of this false notion of literature,” he said late in life. But he did break free of it. He came across enough fresh influences — Martin Tupper, Emerson himself — that he was able to develop a more distinctively American sensibility, augmented with the language of the streets and a dash of the pulpy writing emerging from the nascent penny presses. And by 1855, he was able to take care of the publication of Leaves of Grass entirely by himself — writing parts of the famous preface directly onto the keys of the press in the print shop, and then handling his own advertising and distribution.

What Whitman was doing sounds, of course, very much like blogging or Substack — and I have no doubt that if he were alive today that’s exactly how he would be distributing his work. In an excitable mood, I wrote on my Substack recently that “what we’re really on the cusp of is a whole different way of being”, and what I meant was the capacity of the internet to eliminate gatekeepers and to open the way for the “new, superb democratic literature” that Whitman described. This statement of mine was met with some skepticism. If Emerson “rubbed his eyes a little” at Leaves of Grass, the Substacker Teddy Brown had to “close [his] eyes and rub [his] temples” at the sheer stupidity of what I was saying.

But I stand by it. In one of his more mysterious poems, “The Song of the Answerer”, Whitman describes a figure maybe a century or five centuries in the future who will be his poetic analogue. I had always taken the Answerer to be a kind of Messiah, a Mahdi of lyric poetry, who would provide the “answers” to the poetic questions that Whitman posed. But rereading the poem now, and meditating on the superhuman qualities of the Answerer it occurs to me that Whitman isn’t describing a person but a spirit. What it is is a profound sense of equality: of a mutual respect that extends from mechanics to soldiers to sailors to authors to artists to labourers to gentlemen to prostitutes to beggars to congressmen.

The exuberant, expansive, athletic America of Whitman’s era may be long gone — if it ever really existed — but the vision of the Answerer isn’t as remote as Whitman sometimes makes it seem. It is, simply, a democratic sensibility. To find it requires at the same time, paradoxically, immense humility and a nearly boundless confidence. As Whitman put it, “There was never any more inception than there is now,” and the vision of the Answerer requires little else than a reaching for it.

Lately the algorithm has bored me. I walk in feeling as if I already know the sermon I am about to hear. People are getting engaged, often in fields. They are going to Mexico City and Reykjavík. They are making cocktails, having babies. I visit the algorithm curious about how other people enact their lives, but by now I know it will not teach me happiness. It will only tug my gaze toward sea-moss eye cream and Spanish boots.

And still I go, expecting revelation. The other day I drank a whole coffee while parsing the sudden break up of a couple whose relationship I had thought was rock-solid. Scrolling through their past photos, I searched for crumbs of discontent. How long had they been on the rocks? Did he leave, or did she? And wasn’t it obvious why I needed to know? I had to inoculate myself with their unhappiness. I did not want the same thing to happen to me.

If the Church is a place to revere God, the algorithm is a place to glimpse what, culturally, has replaced Him. With the secularisation of love in the 19th century, “love of God was replaced by love for a specific human being as the most exalting experience of life,” writes biographer and literary critic Phyllis Rose. That explains why the algorithm seems most impressed by photos of romantic partnership, and why reality dating shows consistently top television-viewing charts. We primates thrive in a state of devotion. It is a seductive social myth: that our problems will be solved if we just commit to the right being. The soulmate becomes the silver-bullet for our modern ails. But if religious love is challenged by its ethereality, romantic love is challenged by the corporeal reality of coexistence.

I began reading Rose’s group biography, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983), in August. I had decided to spend the month offline, eating stone fruit and preparing my house for my boyfriend to move in. In a recent Granta interview, headlined “A Good First Marriage is Luck”, Rose said she hoped Parallel Lives might help young people “make th[e] transition” from being individuals to being part of a couple. Wary of self-help, I liked the idea of learning by osmosis.

Parallel Lives is a group biography of five renowned Victorian partnerships, from John Ruskin’s to John Stuart Mill’s. Whether unspooling the creative nourishment of George Eliot’s relationship or the maddening infidelity of Charles Dickens, Rose parses the romantic dynamics of each couple with empathic curiosity. In considering the couple as the smallest political unit, Parallel Lives not only gives us permission to peer, it normalises the impulse. As Rose writes in her introduction: “Gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry… We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying.” I thought of an ex — richer and older than I, with a philosophy degree — who once shamed me for talking about “people, not ideas”. Yet Rose incisively proves that one cannot be peeled from the other. Every relationship becomes a core sample for wider social dynamics — of gender, class, age, beauty, ambition — that shape who we are together, not only in the Victorian era, but today.

Every couple in Parallel Lives includes at least one author or critic. Writers are prone to over-analysis — perhaps stymieing their own contentedness, suggests Rose — but at least they show their work along the way. Years before marrying John Stuart Mill, for example, Harriet Taylor tasked him with writing a position paper on marriage, so they could share them with one another. At the time unhappily wed to someone else, she wrote that few marriages have “any real sympathy or enjoyment or companionship between the parties”. Mill wrote that one problem was unhappy people expecting marriage to miraculously fix them, then blaming their partners when their baselines remained the same. Both believed heartily in divorce.

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Though they shared these words in the 1830s, I would not have flinched had I overheard them in a bar in 2024. All summer my friends and I had been reading new, bestselling novels and memoirs by Gen-X and millennial women disillusioned with heterosexual marriage — books like All Fours by Miranda July, Splinters by Leslie Jamison, and Liars by Sarah Manguso. Over happy hour drinks, we discussed these accounts of how challenging it was to be a contemporary working wife and mother, then went home to unwind with Love is Blind. Sure, “heteropessimism” was in the air — gender and sexuality scholar Asa Seresin had coined the word in 2019 to describe a performative “regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience” — but we still believed in romance, of course we did. We were just hungry for it to be better. More equity. Less rage.

Parallel Lives is a reminder of what, in the face of this appetite, people have tried. Nearly 200 years ago, for example, Mill wrote a document refusing both the property and sexual rights of marriage that would be granted to him if he were “so happy as to obtain [Taylor’s] consent” to marry. It worked. She married him; their union was marked both by his deference and her authority.

In a world before easy divorce, the Victorians in Parallel Lives coped with unhappy marriages in creative, sometimes cruel, ways. They contorted partnerships into lopsided triads, and embarked on don’t-ask-don’t-tell sabbaticals. Today, as the “divorce memoir” boom reminds us, we’re free to leave: to reevaluate our desires, to clean the slate and start again. But rather than liberating the institution of marriage, Rose sees the ever-glowing Exit door as a muddying force. “What does the promise of a permanent commitment mean when everyone knows it’s provisional?” She doesn’t think the answer is less divorce, just less traditional marriage, which “displaces too many other possibilities in our culture”.

Rose doesn’t elaborate directly, but I kept wanting her to break through the decades and weigh in on today’s cultural surge toward non-monogamy, or the “living apart together” trend. Her hunger for new narrative shapes also made me think of another 2024 book, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center, in which Rhaina Cohen writes that we expect too little from our friends and too much from our romantic partners. What if one key to marriage is knowing when to tilt away from it? And when to invest in the web of surrounding community instead?

It is perhaps no coincidence that arguably the happiest couple Rose surveys, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, are childless and not legally married. “Treated as sinful lovers, they remained lovers,” Rose writes. Free of expectations to socialise with one another’s friends or co-host dinner parties, they pursued their own needs instead of following societal scripts. “Being happy in each other, we find everything easy,” Eliot wrote to a friend, smugly. Good for you, I thought, but I meant it. Had Rose’s book offered too neat a formula for happy coupledom, I would have been sceptical. Instead, she showed the varied scaffoldings behind both betrayals and mutual support.

At some point I realised that reading Parallel Lives was scratching an itch my algorithm could only dream to reach. Here was the zoom-lens I wanted into other people’s relationships, fed not by public performance but by diaristic and epistolary insights. Biography, writes Rose, always finds its energy in comparison. A reader glimpses their own life through the cracks of the subject’s, asking: “Have I lived that way? Do I want to live that way?” These were the same questions I asked myself wandering the halls of Instagram.

But where the algorithm left me dead-eyed, Parallel Lives left me breathless. Rose writes with an intoxicating authority and aphoristic command. Love, for her, is the “momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power”. And marriage? Nothing less than the “primary political experience in which most of us engage as adults”.

She won me over on every point. By the time I had finished the book, my boyfriend had moved in, and Donald Trump had been re-elected president. America’s “gender war” was no longer rhetorical; it was confirmed by the polls. By then we had thrown parties, tussled over dish-washing rituals, and splurged on a secondhand persimmon-coloured velvet sofa and chair. The day after the election, though, I could barely speak. I felt aflame. Trump’s victory hadn’t surprised me, but the magnitude of it had. Mid-afternoon, I told my boyfriend I might have to stay in a hotel, not because of him, per se, but because of it. Because sometimes the gap between how we occupied the world — him a man; me a woman — felt like the biggest, muddiest ditch.

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“In using the word parallel…I hope to call attention to the gap between the narrative lines as well as to their similarity,” wrote Rose. Two eyewitnesses to an event will almost always describe it in different terms. And how many events do a couple witness together in a day? A year? A marriage? Relationships are, at root, narrative. We each spin an “I” into a version of a “we”. Rose does not believe unhappy marriages are the product of two people fighting, but two versions of reality clashing. In happy marriages, each person “agrees on the scenario they are enacting”.

I did not go to the hotel. Instead, we stepped lightly around each other, until, a few days later, it felt easy again. Meanwhile, my algorithm filled with news articles about the “boysober” and “4b” celibacy movement. The hotel fantasy played to its highest key. Still, I agreed with scholar Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family (2022), who said in an interview that to believe men were “unredeemable” amounted to “a terribly nihilistic worldview”. However nice an apocalypse bunker with all my girlfriends sounds, I don’t want to resign myself to a future of separatist politics. I’d rather fantasise about a world where we can communicate better, together, rather than one where we exist solo, apart.

At the end of her book, Rose clarifies that her point has not been to prove that men like Dickens were “bad husbands”, just to reveal the “examples of behaviour generated inevitably by the peculiar privileges and stresses of traditional marriages”. To call Dickens a bad apple, after all, is to let a rotten barrel off the hook. She compares marriage to a windy tennis match. Power, like wind, will go undetected until it is working against you. And yet I left the book feeling that the answer was not to quit the court, but to normalise “perpetual resistance [and] perpetual rebellion” upon it. How grateful I am that Parallel Lives exists so that we can see, with such startling archival intimacy, how many ways there are to face the net.

I acknowledge, in offering this improvement, that over the course of the novel Ulrich explicitly espouses a life-philosophy; moreover, he even fashions his own name for this philosophy, “essayism”. Essayism is a mode of living whose characteristic expression is a stretch of novel and insightful reflection, “explor[ing] a thing from many sides without encompassing it”. The essayist lives a life of thoughtful observations. Ulrich lives that life, and so does Musil, who is much more interested in filling his novel with thoughtful observations than with any of the usual contrivances of plot or character development. Ulrich recoils against being “a definite person in a definite world”, and instead leverages his mind’s bottomless capacity for re-evaluation to emulate the infinite changeability of “a drop of water inside a cloud”. Ulrich describes his relationship to ideas: “they always provoked me to overthrow them and put others in their place.”

For Ulrich, as for Musil, “there was only one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live.” Isn’t that, in its very essence, a philosophical project? Yes. But there is good reason, nonetheless, to insist that Ulrich is a man without philosophy, namely, the fact that both Musil and Ulrich insist on it, over and over again. Ulrich acknowledges that in his predicament, “he could have turned only to philosophy” but the problem was that philosophy “held no attraction for him”. Again and again: “he was no philosopher.” He took a “somewhat ironic view of philosophy”, because, decades before the novel opens, he had already given up hope of actually finding the right way to live: “our thoughts cannot be expected to stand at attention indefinitely any more than soldiers on parade in summer; standing too long, they will simply fall down in a faint.” The result is that “he was always being provoked to think about what he was observing, and yet at the same time was burdened with a certain shyness about thinking too hard”.

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Thinking hard makes sense if you want answers; it makes less sense if the highest reward you anticipate from your intellectual efforts is surprise. The difference between a philosophical life and an essayistic one is that the former aims at knowledge, while the latter aims at novelty. The characteristic positive response to an essay is: “I hadn’t thought about it that way before”; the essayist’s chief enemy is boredom. Ulrich “always did something other than what he was interested in doing” to ensure his unpredictability, even to himself. The essayist is a responsive, reactive creature, always aware of the standard way of looking at things, and always on the alert for the path of least resistance to some alternative point of view.

In Musil’s telling, the life of an essayist is a tortured one, because it is the life from which philosophy is, not only absent, but, much more specifically, missing. When you look at Ulrich, all you see, at first, is a glib intellectual who smiles at his own clever reflections; but eventually you discern that beside this cheerful and self-confident man there walks, as Musil calls him, “a second Ulrich”. The second Ulrich, “the less visible of the two”, is “searching for a magic formula, a possible handle to grasp, the real mind of the mind, the missing piece,” but he is struck dumb, unable to find any words to express himself. Musil says this man “had his fists clenched in pain and rage”. Ulrich the philosopher is trapped inside Ulrich the essayist.

Musil himself turned down an academic job in philosophy, much to the chagrin of his family, in favour of writing a book of thoughtful observations. The book, and the character of Ulrich, show us what it is like to be a thinker without a quest: perpetually idle in spite of all one’s ceaseless, restless intellectual activity.

Ulrich is a serial womaniser whose relation to women is analogous to, and therefore gives us insight into, his relation to ideas. Early in the novel he describes an evening with one of his lovers using two images: the first is a “ripped-out page” from a book. The evening, although enjoyable, didn’t connect to any larger narrative. Ulrich was not looking for a wife, or to start a family; he just likes being around them, until he doesn’t — and this means that his romantic evenings fail to add up, like a series of vacations. The second image, even more striking, is that of a tableau vivant: a frozen drama, where actors pose motionless to recreate a famous scene. Imagine, for example, an actress playing the role of Medea standing over her children with a knife. Musil describes such a moment as “full of inner meaning, sharply outlined, and yet, in sum, making absolutely no sense at all”. The tableau vivant makes no sense because you would never hold a knife like that, still, poised, hovering over someone: that position only makes sense in the context of other positions, into which it is integrated as a motion. This is an apt description of what happens when ideas are forced to do the work to which they would only be suited if you did not remove any possibility of ever “wholly encompassing some subject matter”. When you chop human love, or human thought, into pieces, the effect is similar to chopping a human body into pieces: horrifying.

Musil fought in the First World War; during the Second World War, the Nazis banned his books and he lived in exile with his Jewish wife in Switzerland. He died in 1942, leaving The Man Without Qualities, which he had been obsessively revising for decades, unfinished. It is a remarkable fact about the novel that Ulrich, Musil’s alter ego, sets foot in neither war. The novel opens in August 1913, and in over a thousand pages it never manages to traverse the 11 months to the start of the First World War. Musil knew something of the atrocities of dehumanised modern warfare and the brutality of totalitarian oppression, but they were not his subject matter. Instead, he wanted to report, firsthand, on what he had seen earlier, back when times were supposedly good, a realisation so disturbing that not even two subsequent world wars could distract him from it: “there is just something missing in everything.” In bad times, short-term goals crowd your field of view; it is precisely when times are good that you are in a position to take a step back and notice that the big, long-term goal, the one that is supposed to hold everything together, is what has gone missing.

I read The Man Without Qualities for the first time when I was in graduate school in Classics, and within a year, I had left that programme and switched to philosophy. Why, given that I had been devouring philosophical texts since high school, didn’t I major in it in college, or pursue it after college? I don’t think I could have put it this way at the time, but: I was afraid. The fear was partly an insecurity about myself — that I wouldn’t measure up, that I had nothing to contribute, that I was not worthy to walk the esteemed corridors of philosophy — but the other part, the deeper part, was a fear about philosophy. I was afraid that if I looked carefully, I would discover that there really were no answers out there. As long as I never tried to find the right way to live, I couldn’t definitively say it didn’t exist. I’m not claiming that Musil reassured me that it did. No, what The Man Without Qualities gave me was a vivid and terrifying glimpse of the life of thoughtful observations; Musil was my ghost of Christmas future. I would have to, somehow, find in myself the resources to believe that inquiry was possible, both for human beings in general, and for me in particular, because, as scary as the prospect of failure was, I had just seen something scarier.

You could think of a mind as having a dial that is usually turned way down, except on those occasions when we need to solve a specific problem, but even then, we only turn it up a little. What would happen if you set it to maximum, all the time? It would chew through everything — through our usual self-justifications, through the conceit of inevitability that attaches to our habits and customs, through the thin scaffolding of reason that holds life together. Such a mind would become, as Ulrich once describes himself, “a machine for the relentless devaluation of life”. The only way to avoid this result is to give the mind a task worthy of its powers, by presenting it with the sorts of questions one can, without shyness, think hard about. But that entails some hope of arriving at answers. This is one way to think about philosophy: a safe space for the unfettered operation of mind.

If both Henry James and Thomas Mann were writing relatively close to the period they were depicting, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958) was written nearly a hundred years after the event. It is nevertheless considered a classic account of the Italian Risorgimento, examining it through the Prince of Salina, a Sicilian aristocrat in his mid-forties who grapples with the forces unleashed on the island by the collapse of the old Bourbon Regime in 1860. And the film version by Luchino Visconti (1963) is still one of the most powerful pieces of cinema ever created.

The Leopard is an extraordinarily ambivalent and complex work of art, but from the historical and political point of view, it is dominated by two themes. First, there is the tension between continuity and change. The Prince, initially loyal to the King in Naples, is persuaded by his impetuous young nephew, Tancredi, that he should embrace the revolution and in so doing neutralise it. “Unless we ourselves take a hand now,” Tancredi famously warns, “they’ll foist a Republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

At least on the surface, it seems as if the Prince’s bet pays off. The revolutionary zealots of Garibaldi are soon replaced by the polished Piedmontese officers of the new united Italian army. The inhabitants of the Prince’s summer holiday retreat at Donnafugata welcome him back as if nothing had changed. Tancredi marries the daughter of the wealthy upstart mayor Don Calogero and goes into politics.

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Second, The Leopard exposes the failure of Italian Unification. Lampedusa shows it to have been basically a takeover of the south by the north. The Piedmontese envoy sent to persuade the Prince to become a senator in the new united legislature refers to the happy “annexation” before hastily correcting himself to “union” while the Prince himself predicts that it will “simply mean Torinese rather than Neapolitan dialect, that is all”. Unification was also maimed at the start by the mendacity of the liberal nationalists who simply binned contrary votes in the referendum on unification. In the film, the announcement of the cooked result becomes farcical as the off-key band keeps on breaking into Don Calogero’s platitudinous speech.

The enduring relevance of The Leopard to Italy is obvious. Nearly 175 years after unification, the country remains fundamentally divided between north and south, and more so than any other European country. The Mezzogiorno — as the south of the country is often called — still lags far behind the more developed north. A major contemporary political party, the Lega, formerly Lega Nord, has espoused secession in the past. No wonder that The Leopard is a set text in Italian schools.

It is with respect to Europe as a whole, though, that the book resonates most powerfully today. Before we can understand why, we need to come to a better understanding of the author’s beliefs and intentions. The cynical phrase about things changing so that they can stay the same was certainly Tancredi’s belief and the Prince’s hope, but it reflected neither Lampedusa’s own programme, nor what he was trying to convey about the nature of the Risorgimento. It has been widely misinterpreted.

The author despaired not only of the Sicilian aristocracy from which he descended but also of the island as a whole. We know from his excellent biographer David Gilmour that Lampedusa was no reactionary, but an Anglophile Whig. He dearly wished that his ancestors had grasped, for example, the possibilities opened up to them by the British-brokered Sicilian constitution of 1812. He wanted nothing more than for his countrymen to wake from their torpor and join what he called in the novel “the flow of universal history”. Visconti captured this inertia well with the two great scenes which bookend his film: the lengthy opening recitation of the rosary, so rudely interrupted by news of Garibaldi’s landing; and the interminable dance sequences, a kind of aristocratic rosary, at the end, punctuated by gunshots marking the execution of some now redundant revolutionaries.

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Compromise killed off the Habsburgs

By Brendan Simms

It was, in fact, the Prince himself who delivered the most devastating indictment of Sicily’s failure to progress. Surely, the kind if naïve Piedmontese envoy asks, “the Sicilians must want to improve”? The Prince replies that “the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery”. Their “pride”, he continues, is merely “blindness”. What Sicilians want from politics, the Prince says, is “sleep and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them”. That is why, he explains, the island had always been a “colony” and, we intuit, always will be.

Unsurprisingly, The Leopard shocked Lampedusa’s aristocratic relatives when it came out, and outraged wider opinion in Sicily. The book was clearly an indictment of the island and its history. Leonardo Sciascia, then Sicily’s greatest living writer, bitterly attacked it on those grounds. If he later recanted, then only because he had come to agree with Lampedusa.

The author did not believe that things did not change. They plainly did, even in the novel. The Prince’s power, and that of his class, slips away in myriad ways. He himself acknowledges in a famous exchange with his confessor, Father Pirrone, that the nobility has merely secured a stay of execution, not developed a viable strategy for long-term survival. In due course, Mussolini plunged the nation into a catastrophic war, which Lampedusa alludes to only in passing, in an aside about the Pittsburgh-made American bomb which later shatters the palace in which the ball took place. When Lampedusa was writing in the Fifties, the latest conquerors of Sicily had been the Anglo-Americans who landed on the island in 1943, booted out the Nazis, and blasted his childhood home in Palermo to pieces.

Europe today is Italy yesterday (and today). The continent, Henry Kissinger lamented back in 2019 at a policy event, had “checked out” and was making neither a sufficient financial nor an adequate intellectual contribution to the common defence. If it persisted in this stance, Kissinger also warned, the continent would end up as a “strategic appendage of Eurasia”, of the Sino-Russian cartel — in effect a colony.

Kissinger could easily have expanded the indictment. At the time of his remarks, the European Union was attempting to run a common currency without a common state or even a common economic policy, causing a sovereign debt crisis which nearly destroyed the euro. It had created a passportless common travel area without properly securing its external border, resulting in an unprecedented migration crisis. Meanwhile, the continent was rapidly losing its economic edge to the Indo-Pacific. In the field of security, Europe was not only failing to mobilise against Vladimir Putin’s ambitions but actually deepening its dependency on Russian energy through the construction of a second pipeline through the Baltic Sea.

Since then, the situation has deteriorated further. Even Putin’s full-scale attack on Ukraine, though it produced the biggest European response to date, did not lead to a sea change. In fact, some European countries like Germany are beginning to retreat from the strong stances they adopted at the outset. Olaf Scholz’s much-heralded Zeitenwende has thus joined the long list of turning-points at which German (and European) history failed to turn. Scholz’s government wanted to change things just enough so they could stay the same. In security terms, most of Europe is still little more than an American colony, completely dependent on US military protection. But as the war in Ukraine reaches its denouement and President-elect Donald Trump threatens to withdraw, or at least re-negotiate, the American defence umbrella, the Continent needs to wake from its deep Sicilian slumber.

If Europeans really want things to remain halfway the same, in other words to maintain their standard of living, security and territorial integrity, they will have to make some very far-reaching changes. As British and American observers, including the present author, have repeatedly pointed out there are basically two options. Europe can form a full political union rallying the entire resources of the Continent on the lines of the United Kingdom or the United States. Alternatively, the Continent can re-configure itself as a looser confederation of sovereign nation-states each of which is truly committed to its own and the collective defence through Nato. So far, Europeans have done neither, not because anyone is stopping them, but because like The Leopard’s Sicilians they prefer the rest of oblivion to the effort of action.

Most likely, neither the election of Donald Trump, nor the dire situation in Ukraine will actually rouse Europe from its torpor. As Russia advances, Europeans will recite interminable rosaries about the need to “step up”, but they will not undertake the necessary fundamental reform. Europe’s vanity is stronger than its sense of strategic squalor. Like Lampedusa’s Sicily, the Continent thinks itself already perfect, and certainly far superior to its Anglo-American lecturers. But the idea that Europeans just have to change a little so that things stay the same is an illusion. While the continent sleeps, things are changing, and will continue to change, just not for the better.