The only “desire” that alas never abandoned Leopardi was that of a “good and ready death” (last letter to his father, 27 May 1837); with the words of Tristan: “I envy the dead, and with them alone would I swap. All pleasant imagination, all thought of the future I have, ... consists of death, ... Nor do in this my desire the remembrance of my childhood dreams and the thought of having lived in vane disturb me any more”.

In the Zibaldone he makes some important considerations on the subject of desire for, obviously unsatisfied, happiness:

 

“The human soul (and so all living beings) essentially always desires, and only aims at, albeit in a thousand different aspects, pleasure, that is to say happiness, which, if we consider it carefully, is all one with pleasure” [165-79, 3550-2] – the old as compared to the young, is “less alive in his desires, will more easily suffer the deprivation of that which he desires, and will desire things that he can easily be satisfied with” [294-9, 2736-9, 3265-9] – we often have a desire for death, but reason and nature dissuade us [814-6] – “to desire to live is to desire to be happy ” [829-30] –hope is better than pleasure, because desires “are never absolutely clear and distinct and precise” [1017-8] – to desire is the most common of human states, and the most unhappy [1584-6, 2861] – happiness consists in having few, none too vivid, desires [2495-6] – the desire for love frightens, because we intuit it is difficult to achieve [3443-6] – “Every free act of the mind, every thought that is not independent of will, is in some sense a current desire” [3842-3] – inurement consists of “the desire for happiness left pure, without either unhappiness or  positive happiness” [3714-5, 3879-90] – “man in each instant of his thinking and felt  life desires infinitely more and better than what he has” [4126, 4250] – “the loss of all hope” was the cause for Leopardi of the loss of “virtually all desire” [4301].