The Complete Cosmicomics

by Italo Calvino

His ambition in inventing this new genre was that literature should keep pace with the enormous progress being made in scientific research.

Cosmicomics

This book should be read again, in 10 years or more (2028 or later), after reading many or all of the literature referenced herein.

Climb up on the Moon? Of course we did. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a ladder against her and scramble up.

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.

I thought only of the Earth. It was the Earth that caused each of us to be that someone he was rather than someone else; up there, wrested from the Earth, it was as if I were no longer that I, nor she that She, for me. I was eager to return to the Earth, and I trembled at the fear of having lost it. The fulfilment of my dream of love had lasted only that instant when we had been united, spinning between Earth and Moon; torn from its earthly soil, my love now knew only the heart-rending nostalgia for what it lacked: a where, a surrounding, a before, an after.

and at the same time it marked me, I carried it with me, it inhabited me, possessed me entirely, came between me and everything with which I might have attempted to establish a relationship.

Now, however, it wasn’t my motive in making it that mattered to me, but how it was made,

I saw it, the sign, but not that one, a similar sign, a sign unquestionably copied from mine, but one I realized immediately couldn’t be mine, it was so squat and careless and clumsily pretentious, a wretched counterfeit of what I had meant to indicate with that sign whose ineffable purity I could only now—through contrast—recapture.

But in the duration of that galactic year we already began to realize that the world’s forms had been temporary up until then, and that they would change, one by one. And this awareness was accompanied by a certain annoyance with the old images, so that even their memory was intolerable.

blushes that lasted whole geological eras:

Now, there wasn’t a single sign of mine in space. I could start drawing another, but I knew that signs also allow others to judge the one who makes them, and that in the course of a galactic year tastes and ideas have time to change, and the way of regarding the earlier ones depends on what comes afterwards; in short, I was afraid a sign that now might seem perfect to me, in two hundred or six hundred million years would make me look absurd.

but there were those who insisted that the concept of ‘immigrant’ could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time.

for her anything that looked likely to break the absolute visual neutrality was a harsh discord; beauty began for her only where the greyness had extinguished even the remotest desire to be anything other than grey. How could we understand each other? Nothing in the world that lay before our eyes was sufficient to express what we felt for each other, but while I was in a fury to wrest unknown vibrations from things, she wanted to reduce everything to the colourless beyond of their ultimate substance.

but he still couldn’t stop larding his talk with all the slanders and intolerance he had grown up in the midst of.

It just wasn’t possible to make him accept a reality different from his own. And yet, his opinions continued to exert an authority over all of us; in the end we asked his advice about matters he didn’t begin to understand, though we knew he could be dead wrong.

We bet on what events would or would not take place; the choice was virtually unlimited, because up till then absolutely nothing had happened.

whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines, legible in many ways but intrinsically illegible, a doughy mass of events without form or direction, which surrounds, submerges, crushes all reasoning.

To discover that such a great part of my reputation was at the mercy of a character who was so untrustworthy left me prostrate.

By now I had lost my self-confidence. I was afraid I wouldn’t receive any greater amends from the other galaxies, either. Those who had seen me had seen me in a partial, fragmentary, careless way, or had understood only up to a point what was happening, missing the essential quality, not analysing the elements of my personality which, from one situation to the next, were thrown into relief.

All I had to do was carry those signs wherever I went and raise one or the other, according to the occasion.

And, thinking of this judgement I would no longer be able to change, I suddenly felt a kind of relief, as if peace could come to me only after the moment when there would be nothing to add and nothing to remove in that arbitrary ledger of misunderstandings, and the galaxies which were gradually reduced to the last tail of the last luminous ray, winding from the sphere of darkness, seemed to bring with them the only possible truth about myself, and I couldn’t wait until all of them, one after the other, had followed this path.

While we were bent over, doing the hardest part of the job, that is creating something to be seen, they were quietly taking on the easiest part: adapting their lazy, embryonic receptive organs to what there was to receive: our images.

I knew how Sibyl reacted in these cases: assuming an attitude of blatant superiority, if not of downright cynicism, acting like a person who is never surprised by anything. She behaved this way to provoke me, I believe (that is, I hope; I would certainly have felt even greater anguish at the thought that she acted out of real indifference).

taking care to formulate a question that would show nothing but objective curiosity and yet would force Sibyl to say something to appease my anxiety (so I still hoped for this from her, I still insisted that her calm reassure me),

we are trying to give the Earth its former natural appearance, we are reconstructing the primitive terrestrial crust of plastic and cement and metal and glass and enamel and imitation leather. But what a long way we have to go! For a still incalculable amount of time we will be condemned to sink into the lunar discharge, rotten with chlorophyll and gastric juices and dew and nitrogenous gases and cream and tears. We still have much to do, soldering the shiny and precise plates of the primordial terrestrial sheath until we have erased—or at least concealed—the alien and hostile additions.

For some time we had been tormented by doubts as to who was a monster and who wasn’t, but that too could be considered long settled: all of us who existed were non-monsters, while the monsters were all those who could exist and didn’t, because the succession of causes and effects had clearly favoured us, the non-monsters, rather than them.

Perhaps I was paying for my happiness by renouncing any understanding of what I was living through.

At Penn Station I get off the train, I take the subway, I stand and grasp the strap with one hand to keep my balance while I hold my newspaper up in the other, folded so I can glance over the figures of the stock market quotations: 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.

This, which you call order, is a threadbare patch over disintegration; I found a parking space but in two hours I’ll have to go down again to put another coin in the meter; if I forget they’ll tow my car away.

the vital flux,

Title of a Piece

As for those who so exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, I believe they are brought to say these things through their great desire to live a long time and through the terror they have of death. And not considering that, if men were immortal, these men would not have had an opportunity to come into the world. They would deserve to encounter a Medusa’s head, which would transform them into statues of jasper or of diamond, to make them more perfect than they are . . . And there is not the slightest doubt that the Earth is far more perfect, being, as it is, alterable, changeable, than if it were a mass of stone, even if it were a whole diamond, hard and impenetrable. Galileo Galilei, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi, giornata I

there, you see that being in love was even then searing passion for what was outside me,

And it isn’t true that a state of desire presupposes necessarily a desired something; the desired something begins to exist only when there is the state of desire; not because before that something wasn’t desired but because before who knew it existed?

I disagree, and strongly.

But you’d better see what you’re going to see when the right time comes, because if I keep making clarifications within other clarifications I’ll never find my way out again.

With this I don’t mean to refer to other hunting experiences of mine: an archer, the moment he thinks he’s experienced, is lost; every lion we encounter in our brief life is different from every other lion; woe to us if we stop to make comparisons, to deduce our movements from norms and premises.

But the danger I risk is that the content of t1, of the universe-instant t1, is so much more interesting, so much richer than t0, in emotions and surprises either triumphant or disastrous, that I might be tempted to devote myself entirely to t1, turning my back on t0, forgetting that I had moved to t1 only to gain more information on t0. And in this curiosity about t1, in this illegitimate desire for knowledge about a universe-instant that isn’t mine, in wanting to discover if I would really be making a good bargain trading my stable and secure citizenship of t0 for that modicum of novelty that t1 could offer me, I might take a step into t2 just to have a more objective notion of t1; and that step into t2 might, in turn . . .

and if I am led to reflect on it this evening it’s because now that the external possibilities of distraction diminish, the internal ones get the upper hand within me, and my thoughts race on their own in a circuit of alternatives and doubts I can’t disengage; in other words, I have to make a special effort to concentrate on my driving.

what I mean is, I want her to know I’m racing towards her but at the same time I want to know she’s racing towards me.

The image I derive is this: a fortress that grows around us, and the longer we remain shut up in it the more it removes us from the outside.

to the point where the general disorder started to be able to be considered the natural order of things.

The result was that I made myself tiresome and unpleasant to everybody, without this bringing me any closer to her.

a void secretly shot through with veins and temptations to be something,

poor, frail universe, born of nothing, all we are and do resembles you.

But if that’s true, then so is its opposite; ever since that August when the mushroom rose over cities reduced to a layer of ash, an age was born in which the explosion is symbolic only of absolute negation. But that was something we already knew anyway, from the moment when, rising above the calendar of terrestrial chronicle, we enquired of the destiny of the universe, and the oracles of thermodynamics answered us: every existing form will break up in a blaze of heat; there is no entity can escape the irretrievable disorder of the corpuscles; time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.

Any way time runs it leads to disaster whether in one direction or its opposite and the intersecting of those directions does not form a network of rails governed by points and exits, but a tangle, a knot . . .