The Leopard on DVD
" If at times he seems remote, not fully present in the life swirling around him, it's simply because he suffers, as the great 19th-century poet Giacomo Leopardi did, from a too acute and too constant awareness of transience. 'We were the leopards, the lions,' he tells an earnest politician, and 'those who take our place will be jackals, hyenas.' But even that bitter-sounding statement isn't offered as a defense of his class, for he continues: 'And all of us--leopards, lions, jackals and sheep--will go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.'"