The Complete Cosmicomics

by Italo Calvino

and the emptied sky gaped like an abyss where, at the bottom, the stars had begun multiplying, and the night poured a river of emptiness over me, drowned me in dizziness and alarm.

I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.

she dreamed—from what we could understand of her ravings—of a darkness a hundred times deeper and more various and velvety.

And our life in the midst of all this would have to face constant transformations, in the course of which whole races would disappear, and the only survivors would be those who were prepared to change the bases of their existence so radically that the reasons why living was beautiful would be completely overwhelmed and forgotten.

These were only ephemeral episodes in a life otherwise calm and uneventful.

‘You’ll understand when you’ve forgotten what you understood before.’

I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there’s an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpenetration of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles.

I wanted to persuade myself that these were only apparent flaws, that they were all part of a much vaster regular structure, in which every asymmetry we thought we observed really corresponded to a network of symmetries so complicated we couldn’t comprehend it,

Barely five million millennia will go by and the Sun will swell up until it swallows Mercury, Venus and Earth, and a series of cataclysms will start all over again, one after the other, at tremendous speed. Who knows where we’ll land up? So, try to enjoy this small amount of peace that we have left.’

I’ll wait here, until the Sun and everything that goes round it is reduced to a decrepit dwarf star; I’ll dig myself a niche amidst the hardest atoms, I’ll tolerate flames of every colour, as long as I can finally get to that dead end, that siding, as long as I can reach the shore that nobody ever leaves again.’

our life was in the freedom of space criss-crossed by rays of light, amidst the bursts of solar explosions that constantly buffeted us this way and that, outside all dimensions and forms.

Days and nights crashed over me like waves, all interchangeable, identical or marked by totally fortuitous differences, a toing and froing where it was impossible to establish any sense or norm.

The present landed on me with so many different aspects I could not establish any succession: waves, nights, afternoons, ebbs, winters, quarters of the moon, tides, summer heatwaves; my fear was of losing myself in all this, of splitting myself up into as many myselves as there were bits of the present that were dumped on me, layer after layer, and that for all I knew might all have been simultaneous, each one inhabited by a bit of myself that was contemporaneous with all the other bits.

time refused to last, it was a friable substance, destined to crumble into pieces;

time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.

Praise be to the stars that implode. A new freedom opens up within them: annulled from space, exonerated from time, existing, at last, for themselves alone and no longer in relation to all the rest, perhaps only they can be sure they really exist.