SOURCE: Moravia, Alberto. “Boccaccio.” In Man as an End: A Defense of Humanism: Literary, Social, and Political Essays, translated by Bernard Wall, pp. 143-55. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1965.

In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1955, Moravia argues that the defining quality of Boccaccio's literary sensibility is a love of adventure rather a than concern for morality or for depicting character psychology.

It has been remarked before now that while true men of action are usually embittered if reduced to impotence, inertia and incapacity, placid and dreamy men find that these things enrich and enhance the very real pleasure they derive from their imagination. It is surely not an accident that writers of adventure stories are mostly sedentary people.

Moreover these imaginative yet lazy men, these insatiable yet stationary pursuers of action, are by nature and necessity very far removed from any form of moral...