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Why did Calvino write the cosmicomic stories? The main reason was that he felt that realist fiction was exhausted and that the writer had to turn elsewhere for inspiration. For Calvino in the early 1960s this place was science,
Now, you will ask me what in the world we went up on the Moon for; I’ll explain it to you. We went to collect the milk, with a big spoon and a bucket. Moon-milk was very thick, like a kind of cream cheese.
The Captain’s wife played the harp; she had very long arms, silvery as eels on those nights, and armpits as dark and mysterious as sea urchins;
This was mere unfounded prejudice – that seems obvious to me – because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of ‘immigrant’ could be
now I knew that the more the Dinosaurs disappear, the more they extend their dominion, and over forests far more vast than those that cover the continents: in the labyrinth of the survivors’ thoughts.
I look around, and whom am I looking for? She is still the one I seek; I’ve been in love for five hundred million years, and if I see a Dutch girl on the sand with a beachboy wearing a gold chain around his neck and showing her the swarm of bees to frighten her, there she is: I recognize her from her inimitable way of raising one shoulder until it almost touches her cheek,
What everyone had thought he understood before, the simple and regular way in which things were as they were, was no longer valid; in other words: this was nothing but one of the countless possibilities; nobody excluded the possibility that things could proceed in other, entirely different ways. You would have said that now each individual was ashamed of being the way he was expected to be, and was making an effort to show some irregular, unforeseen aspect:
At other times, however, he has hardly slipped into his tunnel when I hear him make the sound of a long aspiration like somebody preparing to sneeze loudly: in the labyrinth of the fortress there is much cold and damp; but the sneeze never comes. I wait: I wait for a week, for a month, for a year; Faria doesn’t come back; I persuade myself he is dead. All of a sudden the wall opposite trembles as if shaken by an earthquake; from the shower of stones Faria looks out, completing his sneeze.
As Long as the Sun Lasts
My grandmother, though, immediately butted in: ‘And why not on that other one? The bigger they are the more I trust them!’ and she pointed to a Blue Giant. ‘Are you mad, don’t you know what that is? Don’t you know about the blue ones? They burn so fast you don’t even notice, and barely a couple of thousand millennia go by and you’ve already got to start packing!’
Someone had to start not so much to construct as to become, to become something, to come into being in what it was making, to ensure that everything that was left or buried was a sign of something else, the imprint of fish-bones in clay, the carbonized petroliferous forests, the Texas dinosaur’s footprint in the mud of the Cretaceous period, the splintered pebbles of the Palaeolithic period, the mammoth’s carcass found in the Beresovka tundra with the remains of the buttercups it had grazed on twelve thousand years previously still in its teeth, the Venus of Willendorf, the ruins of Ur, the
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Starting with our interrupted spirals, you have put together a continuous spiral you call history.
Your history is the opposite of ours, the opposite of the history of what by moving has not arrived, of what has been lost in order to survive: the hand that modelled the vase, the bookcases that burned at Alexandria, the way the scribe spoke, the flesh of the mollusc that secreted the shell …
Listen: the lie is the real information we have to pass on.
‘Over the last few years, quasars, Seyfert galaxies, BL Lacertae objects, or, more generally, active galactic nuclei, have been attracting the attention of astronomers because of the huge quantities of energy these bodies emit, at velocities of up to 10,000 kilometres per second. There are good reasons for supposing that the central driving force of the galaxy is a black hole of enormous mass’ (L’ Astronomia, no. 36). ‘Active galactic nuclei may be fragments left unexploded by the Big Bang and engaged in a process exactly opposite to that which takes place in black holes, a process, that is,
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