Six Memos for the Next Millennium

by Italo Calvino

For Kundera, the weight of living is found in all types of restriction, in the dense network of public and private restrictions that ultimately envelops every life in ever-tighter bonds. His novel shows us how everything in life that we choose and value for its lightness quickly reveals its own unbearable heaviness.

Indeed, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem heavy and opaque.

If I had to choose an auspicious sign for the approach of the new millennium, I would choose this: the sudden nimble leap of the poet/philosopher who lifts himself against the weight of the world, proving that its heaviness contains the secret of lightness, while what many believe to be the life force of the times—loud and aggressive, roaring and rumbling—belongs to the realm of death, like a graveyard of rusted automobiles.

But this idea of an empty bucket that can lift you beyond the aid and also the greed of others, an empty bucket that stands for deprivation and desire and pursuit, that lifts you so high that your humble plea can no longer be granted—this idea opens the way to endless reflection.

We might say that as soon as an object appears in a narrative, it becomes charged with special force, becomes like the pole in a magnetic field or a node in an invisible network of relations. The object’s symbolic value can be explicit or not, but it is always present. We might even say that any object in a narrative is a magic object.

The art that allows Scheherazade to save her own life each night consists in knowing how to link one story to the other and also how to break off at just the right time—two operations on the continuity and discontinuity of time.

The story is a horse, a means of transport, with a particular gait—trot or gallop—depending on the route to be traveled. And the speed at issue is a mental speed.

today the quality I want to recommend is this: in an age dominated by other media that are much faster and more pervasive and that risk flattening all communication into a single, homogenous crust, the function of literature is to communicate among different things in terms of their differences, exalting rather than diminishing their differences, which is the proper role of written language.

The qualities I have chosen as subjects for these lectures do not, as I said at the start, exclude their opposite qualities. Just as my respect for weight was implicit in my praise of lightness, so this defense of quickness does not presume to deny the pleasures of delay.

Quickness of style and thought means above all nimbleness, mobility, and ease—all qualities that go with writing that is prone to digression, to leaping from one topic to another, to losing the thread a hundred times and finding it again after a hundred twists and turns.

From its beginnings, my work as a writer has aimed to follow the lightning-fast course of mental circuits that capture and link points that are far apart in space and time.

In this fondness for shorter forms I am merely following the true inclination of Italian literature, which is poor in novelists but always rich in poets, who even when writing in prose are at their best in texts where the heights of imagination and thought are contained in a few pages—texts such as Leopardi’s Operette morali (Little moral works), which has no peer in other literatures.

Borges’s idea was to pretend that the book he wanted to write had already been written—written by someone else, some imaginary unknown author, working in a different language, a different culture—and then to describe, summarize, and review that imaginary book. According to an anecdote that’s now part of Borges lore, when the first extraordinary story written along these lines, “El acercamiento a Almotásim” (“The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim”), appeared in the journal Sur in 1940, it was indeed believed to be a review of a book by an Indian author. Similarly it has become obligatory among Borges critics to observe that all his texts double or multiply their own space through other books (whether classical, scholarly, or simply invented) from real or imagined libraries.

Sometimes when I try to concentrate on a story I’d like to write, I realize that what interests me is some other thing, or rather not something specific but everything that gets left out of what I’m supposed to be writing: the relation between that given argument and all its possible variants and alternatives, all the incidents that time and space can contain.

A more complex symbol, one that gave me the greatest opportunity to express the tension between geometric rationality and the tangle of human lives, is that of the city. The book in which I think I’ve had the most to say remains Invisible Cities, because I was able to focus all my reflections and experiences and conjectures on a single symbol. And also because I created a multifaceted structure in which each brief text sits close to others in a sequence that doesn’t suggest causality or hierarchy but rather a network within which one can follow multiple paths and come to various ramified conclusions.

Indeed my writing has always found itself facing two divergent roads that correspond to two kinds of knowledge: one that moves through mental spaces of disembodied rationality, in which lines can be drawn that connect points, projections, abstract shapes, vectors of force; another that moves in a space crowded with objects and seeks to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling pages with words, in a meticulous effort to match the written to the not-written, to the sum of the sayable and the not-sayable.

The various stages of the treatment of an idea—which Ponge would publish one after the other, since the true work consists not in its definitive form but in the series of attempts to reach that form—were for Leonardo-the-writer proof of the energy he invested in writing as a cognitive tool and of the fact that, with all the books he planned to write, he was more interested in the process of inquiry than in the completion of a text for publication.

yet another was an empty suit of armor that moves and speaks as if someone were inside it.

Al from FMA is that you?

For me, then, the first step in the conception of a story occurs when an image that comes to mind seems, for whatever reason, charged with meaning, even if I can’t explain that meaning in logical or analytical terms.

ways. Nowadays we are bombarded by so many images that we can no longer distinguish direct experience from what we’ve seen for a few seconds on television. Bits of images cover our memory like a layer of trash, and among so many shapes it becomes ever more difficult for any one to stand out.

And this is way before doom scrolling

I preferred to ignore the lines of text and carry on my favorite pastime of imagining from within the illustrations as they followed one upon the other.

The artist’s imagination is a world of potentialities that no single work will successfully enact;