給 下 一輪 太平 盛世 的 備忘錄

Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a book based on a series of lectures written by Italo Calvino for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, but never delivered as Calvino died before leaving Italy.

The lectures were originally written in Italian and translated by Patrick Creagh. The lectures were to be given in the fall of 1985, and Memos was published in 1988. The memos are lectures on the values of literature that Calvino felt were important for the coming millennium. At the time of his death Calvino had finished all but the last lecture.

The Memos: The values which Calvino highlights are: 1 - Lightness; 2 - Quickness; 3 - Exactitude; 4 - Visibility; 5 - Multiplicity; All that is known of the sixth lecture is that it was to be on consistency.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و پنجم ماه آوریل سال 2009 میلادی

عنوان: شش یادداشت برای هزاره ی بعدی؛ نویسنده: ایتالو کالوینو؛ مترجم لیلی گلستان؛ تهران، ماهی، 1387؛ در 160ص؛ شابک 9789642090139؛ چاپ دیگر: تهران، نشر مرکز، 1394؛ در شش و 140ص؛ شابک 9789642132683؛ موضوع تاریخ و نقد ادبیات از نویسندگان ایتالیائی - سده 20م

عناوین یادداشتها: سبکی، سرعت، دقت، وضوح، چندگانگی، و ششمین گفتار «سازگاری» نام داشته، «ایتالو کالوینو» گویا یادداشتها را برای ایراد سخنرانی در دانشگاه «هاروارد» آماده کرده بودند، اما درست شب پیش از پرواز برای سخنرانی، بر اثر سكته از درب این دنیا بگذشتند

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 13/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

1) Lightness: not frivolity but a lightness of touch that allows the writer and reader to soar above the paralyzing heaviness of the world.
2) Quickness: the mental speed of the narrative — he takes the rapid trot of a folktale as his model here. The narrative should pull the reader along and not get mired up in questioning the non-essential parts.
3) Exactitude: the novel should be perfectly proportioned. Calvino says his guiding image when composing a literary work is the crystal — the magnificent complexity of it and the fact that it can be held in one hand and admired despite all that complexity. The only way to capture life might be to crystalize it with rigid rules?
4) Visibility: or the visual nature of the literary work is all important. For Calvino, every story begins as a visual cue, to which more and more images are added until he has to summon words to describe this profusion of images. He worries about what will happen to the originality of the visual imagination in a world supersaturated by external images.
5) Multiplicity: a literary work should try to encompass the whole known world. It should be ambitious beyond measure. Without unachievable ambition among its practitioners, literature cannot survive long. So Calvino exhorts us to soar beyond the most distant horizons we can conceive of and then to look down and see everything and then write everything. This section is a paean to the encyclopedic novel.
And lastly,
6) Incompleteness: a good novel would be incomplete, just like this list. No one could locate the last memo.

Per spiegarvi perché bisognerebbe leggere questo saggio a tutti, anche a chi di letteratura non gliene importa e non ne mastica, userò una citazione, una soltanto.

Siamo nella prima lezione, Leggerezza. Uno degli emblemi di questo valore per Calvino è il Cavalcanti protagonista della novella VI,9 del Decameron, un personaggio silenzioso, solitario, un personaggio, anche, che all'inizio della novella in questione sembra molte cose, ma non leggero: è un intellettuale, un filosofo, un letterato, un giovane che rinuncia volentieri alla vita chiassosa e gaudente della gioventù fiorentina e preferisce dedicarsi alla riflessione, alla meditazione, ai libri. Tale messer Betto e la sua compagnia, allora, decidono un giorno di occupare il proprio tempo "dando briga" al povero Guido, che in quel momento passeggia tra i sepolcri di marmo disposti davanti alla chiesa di San Giovanni. I giovani cominciano a sbeffeggiarlo; sembrano divertirsi, anche, finché Guido non risponde con delle parole che li spiazzano: «Signori, voi mi potete dire a casa vostra ciò che vi piace». E Boccaccio continua così: "E posta la mano sopra una di quelle arche, che grandi erano, sì come colui che leggerissimo era, prese un salto e fusi gittato dall'altra parte, e sviluppatosi da loro se n'andò."

L'interpretazione di questa controbattuta è deliziosa, e la lascio a voi, perché, come mi è capitato recentemente di constatare, le battute e le citazioni en passant hanno più gusto quando le si assaggia solo col pensiero, senza adoperare il bisturi del ragionamento scritto che ne squarcerebbe il velo.
Ma arriviamo così alla citazione che vi avevo promesso col mio attacco (no, non era quella la citazione), ossia le parole con cui Calvino commenta questo episodio:

"L'agile salto improvviso del poeta-filosofo [...] si solleva sulla pesantezza del mondo, dimostrando che la sua gravità contiene il segreto della leggerezza, mentre quella che molti credono essere la vitalità dei tempi, rumorosa, aggressiva, scalpitante e rombante, appartiene al regno della morte, come un cimitero d'automobili arrugginite."

Ecco perché questi saggi andrebbero letti a tutti e da tutti. Anche per tante altre ragioni, ma soprattutto per questa: perché Calvino non parla mai di letteratura per la letteratura. Parla di letteratura per l'oggi. Parla di letteratura per me e per i miei coinquilini ingegneri, per mia madre che quando sente nominare Dante suda perché le ricorda le interrogazioni al liceo, per mio padre medico che da ragazzino voleva leggere ma non poteva farlo perché non poteva permettersi i libri, per mia sorella, ragazzina, che i libri può permetterseli ma pare che non voglia investirci più tempo di quanto sia decoroso per una giovincella degli anni duemila. Quando Calvino parla di letteratura, parla della mia letteratura, della sua letteratura, della letteratura di tutti e della letteratura che non esiste, e che forse esisterà o forse no, lui una buona parola ce l'ha messa. Parla di una letteratura eterea come profumo e concreta come pane, e io lo amo.

Quindi, gente, parliamo un po' di letteratura anche noi, parliamone senza essere pesanti e senza essere frivoli. Parliamo di letteratura e facciamo vedere che esser leggeri si può, ed è un bene, e che è ancor meglio se si è leggeri pensando. Che, se qualcuno se lo stesse chiedendo, non è affatto un ossimoro.

ENGLISH REVIEW

In order to explain you why everybody should read this book, even those who about literature don't care and don't understand a thing, I'll use a quote, just one quote.

We are in the first of the lectures, or 'memos', according to the title: Lightness. According to Calvino, one of the most effective symbols of this value is the character of Guido Cavalcanti (he's an Italian poet of the XIII century, he really existed, but be aware that here Calvino's talking about the fictional character), whom we find in the ninth story of the sixth day in Boccaccio's Decameron. Cavalcanti is quiet, solitary; he seems many things, but, at least at the beginning of the story, he does not seem light. Quite the opposite: he's an intellectual, a philosopher, a man of letters, a young man who, rather than spending his time with the boisterous Florentine youth, prefers devoting himself to his studies and his meditations. So, one day, Messer Betto and his company see Guido "walking meditatively" among the marble tombs placed in front of the church of San Giovanni in Florence, and they decide to have a little fun of him. Guido's reply floors them: «Gentlemen, you may say anything you wish to me in your own home». And that's how Boccaccio's goes on: "Then, resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble, he leaped over it and, landing on the other side, made off and rid himself of them." I could write a never-ending poem about why this translation (which, by the way is not mine but taken from the original English text of Calvino's memos) is several light-years away from the beauty and the elegance that this same passage has in Italian, but that's not the point at all.

I want to leave the interpretation of this quick banter to you, because, as I myself have recently noticed, quotes and witty remarks have a sweeter taste when you taste them only with your mouth, without exposing them to the revealing scalpel of a written and thus definitive explanation.
But now, here it is the quote I promised you at the beginning (because no, the previous quote still wasn't it), that is how Calvino comments this episode:

"The sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world shows that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times -noisy, aggressive, revvy and roaring- belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars."

This is why these essays should be read by everyone and to everyone. They should also for other reasons, but for this one above all: because Calvino never speaks about literature only for the sake of literature. He speaks literature fo me and my two flatmates who wants to be engineers, for my mom who can't hear Dante's name without sweating because it reminds her of her school days, for my dad, a doctor, who as a child wanted to read and couldn't because he didn't have the money to afford books, for my little sister who can afford books but doesn't want to give them more time than what's appropriate for a teenager from 2000. When Calvino talks about literature, he talks about my literature, and his literature, and everyone's literature and the literature that does not exist, that maybe will or maybe won't, but however it goes he still gave it credit. He tells us about a literature as ethereal as a scent and as concrete as your daily bread, and I love him.

So, people, let's talk about literature, let's talk about it without heaviness and without frivolity. Let's talk about literature and let's prove that it is possible to be light, and that it's a good thing to be such, and that, better still, it is possible to be light and thinking. Which, for those who are wondering, is not at oxymoron at all.

Now, I am also discovering that I don't really like many books about writing. Moorcock's Death is No Obstacle is, so far as I've read, the best book on writing out there. Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a close second. A *very* close second.

What you won't find in this book are lessons on grammar, editorial tips, or the best way to market your book to the masses using obnoxious tactics like going on Goodreads and spamming members when you have not bothered to review more than a half dozen books or looked to see if said members share any kind of interest in books of your type whatsoever . . . sorry, was I using my outside voice when I said that? Silly me.

What you will find here is a peek behind Calvino's magic curtain. You will see that even his explanations about how he does his work are magical. You won't see the nuts and bolts of how Calvino mechanically goes about constructing his stories (though he is very methodical), but you will see a high-level treatise on Calvino's state of mind as he writes. This is a philosophical text cleverly disguised as a book about writing.

The book is divided into five sections. "Five?" you ask. "What happened to the sixth?" The sixth memo is "Consistency," lightly penciled into the handwritten table of contents provided by Calvino at the beginning of the book. In fact, it looks as if it had been written in, then erased, an irony that is as Calvino-esque as anything else I can think of.

The first memo, "Lightness," is the one thing that I struggle with the most as a writer. Here, Calvino is not talking about lightness as it relates to hue, but as it relates to mass. He gives the example from Boccaccio's Decameron, a story in which the Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti is beset by some men who want to pick a (philosophical) fight with him in a graveyard.

Guido, seeing himself surrounded by them, answered quickly: "Gentlemen, you may say anything you wish to me in your own home." Then, resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble, he leaped over it and, landing on the other side, made off and rid himself of them.

Now, call me strange (it's true), but this is something I can sink my writerly teeth into. I can apply this principle of lightness, not because Calvino has given me specific instructions on how to do it, but because he has opened a window for me to stick my head out, look around, take stock of the landscape, and enjoy it. He's put me in the headspace I need to be in to integrate this principle of lightness into my writing.

And so it is with the remaining principles. Of "Quickness," Calvino states:

I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.

And, reading the context of this memo, I know exactly what he means and see that struggle in myself. In fact, this is my favorite quote about writing ever written. But can I take this down to the grammatical level and explain it to someone else? Hardly. I know in my bones what Calvino is saying, but explain it in figures and diagrams, I cannot.

In the section on "Exactitude," Calvino goes to some extent to explain how vagueness can only be properly described, with exactitude. In speaking of the evocative power of words and the importance of using them in the most exact way, he states:

The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

Again, a bit of intuition and reflection is required to really grasp what he is saying. Not because his statement is poorly written, but because this notion is an abstract concept. This "writing book," if one can assign such a banal descriptor to it, requires the reader to think!

Memo four, "Visibility," dwells on the imagination as the impetus for all creativity, particularly the visual imagination. While he acknowledges that literary work might arise from the hearing of a good turn of phrase or from an academic exercise, the majority of such creations arise from a visual cue in the writer's mind. Thus, the need to use exactitude to describe the visual seed of a story or book, which allows the reader to see into the mind of the writer, if but for a moment, and anchors the story in the reader's mind.

"Multiplicity" is the fifth and most inappropriately titled memo. I might have used the word "Nestedness" or even "Complexity" to give the reader a head start, but, hey, it wasn't my book to write. I do feel that this is the weakest section of the book (and Calvino acknowledges as much), as the decision to try to form an all-inclusive novel (meaning: including ALL), is really a question of writerly preference, rather than a universal principle which one ought to apply to writing a novel. Still, Calvino calls on the example of Borges and the Oulipo to demonstrate what is possible in a novel, eve if the pursuit of such a work might not always be advisable.

As a part of this fifth memo, Calvino states his vision of the aim of literature:

. . . the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes,' into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.

Unfortunately, Calvino did not live to see the new millennium. He would have been fascinated by the possibilities of hypertext, no doubt, and his memo on multiplicity dwells, in fact, on the need for more open-ended work with several possible endings, a multi-dimensional plot that reaches through various realities (a'la Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths"), and gathers them into one text. He even goes so far as to call his experimental If on a winter's night a traveler a "hypernovel".

Perhaps, in another reality, Calvino is exploring the infinite possibilities of literature and will one day find his way back to teach us more, like some kind of literary Messiah. In the meantime, he has left Six Memos for the Next Millennium as a travel journal showing the direction he might have gone; inviting us to follow.

It was a melancholy journey too. The five essays here were prepared by Sig. C in preparation for a series of talks to American students. The sixth was never written. Calvino died of a brain haemorrhage before he could begin. And that would mean there would be no further works from the author of 'Invisible Cities' and 'If on a Winter's Night', 'Diffficult Loves' and 'The Baron in the Trees'. This leaves one feeling bereft also. Imagine what more might have come from quella penna - the brilliant 'Palomar' had appeared just two years before.

And coming from the pen of Calvino, this is not a straightforward guide to writing, there are no chapters on plotting and point of view or the use of commas and semi-colons. Sig. C themes his talks into qualities that great literature might possess, providing us with an insight into his compositional process as he does so. These qualities are elusive yet pertinent: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity. We shall never know what he had to say about consistency...

'Lightness' and 'Quickness' tell us much about Calvino's approach. 'Lightness' involves both the removal of unnecessary words and transporting the reader on a fantastic journey, on a magic carpet ride or the like. It explains his fondness for fairy tale and myth. Then there is quickness, the brevity to be found in the chapters in 'Invisible Cities' and 'Palomar'. He cites a concisely-told legend about Charlemagne's love for a young woman as the template for this ideal.

'Visibility' explores the link between an image and the words that describe it, and, inter alia, the matter of which came first. Calvino argues that for some writers it's the latter and for others (himself included), it's the former. He says that many of the 'Cosmicomics' began with a single image or vision around which the brief tale was built. He quotes from Dante and Loyola, suggesting that they worked in the same way, employing their "mental cinema" (what a superb phrase!) to describe the unseen, their visions of heaven and hell.

Calvino cites Carlo Emilio Gadda (hitherto unknown to me) and Musil as producers of 'Multiplicity', pursuing the encyclopaedic, elaborating and digressing, even preventing the latter from being able to complete his work. He cites Flaubert and Proust too then brings things up-to-date (c. 1985) with his admiration for Borges and Perec (it was reciprocated). And who better to represent this concept than the two great writers who explored the encyclopaedic through such very different methods?

I think my favourite quotation of all came from 'Exactitude', where Calvino showed us another Italian genius at work, da Vinci revising his description of a sea monster, inspired by the unearthing of a fossilised creature (I was also fascinated to learn about the old theory that the earth was expanding and swallowing up such specimens):

O how often were you seen amid the waves of the vast and swollen ocean, like a mountain defeating and subduing them, and your black and bristling back ploughing through the waters, and your stately, solemn bearing!

Here Calvino seeks to present the exactitude of both abstract concepts and the visibly perceived. He also quotes that exquisite passage from his own work where Polo describes the square of a chess board to Khan and the history of the tree that was felled to make it.

These essays are a delight for the reader and writer alike. Grazie mille, vecchio amico, e riposa in pace.

INTERVIEWER: What place, if any at all, does delirium have in your working life?

ITALO CALVINO: Delirium? . . . Let’s assume I answer, I am always rational. Whatever I say or write, everything is subject to reason, clarity, and logic. What would you think of me? You’d think I’m completely blind when it comes to myself, a sort of paranoiac. If on the other hand I were to answer, Oh, yes, I am really delirious; I always write as if I were in a trance, I don’t know how I write such crazy things, you’d think me a fake, playing a not-too-credible character. Maybe the question we should start from is what of myself do I put into what I write. My answer—I put my reason, my will, my taste, the culture I belong to, but at the same time I cannot control, shall we say, my neurosis or what we could call delirium.

-------------------------------

Italo Calvino is a literary philosopher. He has always strived to provide an alternative view to see through this world and to decipher its beauty and secrets through the mode of imagination and fantasy. His mind is few of those which fascinates and asks me to question the very possibilities of human intelligence. When I finished reading, "If on a winter's night a traveller" and "Invisible Cities", I was intrigued and thrilled, and had a nagging curiosity to understand the working; the underlying formula; the quest which must have lead the author to write them. "Six Memos for the next millennium" provides me a window to understand the methodology and motivation of Calvino's art and magic.

Reading Calvino is an experience in itself. He has the marvelous gift to create at the juxtaposition of science and art, the man who wants to combine both. This particular book under discussion is a loose speech prepared to be delivered in Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, in 1984. "They became an obsession, and one day he announced to me that he had ideas and material for eight lectures", writes his wife Esther. And further continues to say that the eighth lecture, had it been presented, would have been, "On the beginning and the ending[of novels]". But this collection has five lectures, sixth one unwritten, and provides the dissection of Calvino's own works and also an idea of the enormous range of his inspirations.

Heads up, Calvino places 'Lightness' as the first value to be discussed. As someone whose writings makes the reader to fly, it is no surprise that Calvino places this value on top. He is quick to make it clear that he is proposing to talk of the lightness which one derives from intelligence/ thoughtfulness, and not the lightness of frivolity. "Lightness for me goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard", and aptly quotes Paul Valery,"One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather". Of all the passages which he writes to espouse his first value, the one that stood close to my heart is his tribute to Milan Khundera's novel "The unbearable Lightness of Being". When I finished Kundera's novel, I had the feeling of jubilant joy and freshness as if I stood beside a waterfall with patchy greenery surrounding it. I never fully understood the reason behind the 'light' feeling I had then, for the novel is an excruciatingly painful one to read. But, Calvino explains beautifully:

"His novel shows how everything we choose and value in life for its lightness soon reveals its true, unbearable weight. Perhaps only the liveliness and mobility of the intelligence escape this sentence - the very qualities with which this novel is written, and which belong to a world quite different from the one we live in"

With 'Quickness' as his second lecture, he brings open the secret of a story which is its economy, the form and structure, rhythm and underlying logic. His love for fairytales and folklore, and his varied reading of classics have peppered the whole book, and he quotes them laboriously to show the agility of thought and expression. Like a tangent that strikes an arc and flow on its own, he touches Galileo, Leopardi and mythology, and he turns himself into a thread that connects the parallels. He also predicts the sure raise of mass media (and social media), and had the foresight to suggest that Conciseness will be the virtue of the new millennia.

"I will confine myself to telling you that I dream of immense cosmologies, sagas, and epics all reduced to the dimensions of an epigram"

In 'Exactitude' and 'Visibility', Calvino explores the calculated and well-defined symmetry of a work, and the beauty and nature of visual imagination, respectively. Julian Barnes has said, “Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.”  It is the same kind of obsession which Calvino exudes. His search is to create an art as perfect as a mathematical equation or a geometry. To create an orderliness using literature as his medium.

Literature - and I mean the literature that matches up these requirements - is the Promised Land in which language becomes what it really ought to be.

A work of literature is one of these minimal portions in which the existent crystallizes into a form, acquires a meaning - not fixed, not definitive, not hardened into a mineral immobility, but alive as an organism. Poetry is the great enemy of chance, in spite of also being a daughter of chance and knowing
that in the last resort, chance will win the battle

Both 'Exactitude' and 'Visibility' are also the values which could easily be expected in other arts and most importantly in painting, drawing etc., Perhaps, is it because of the fact that Calvino himself was trained in the art of drawing when he was an adolescent and his extraordinary love for movies as a youngster that must have led him to the love of forms and colors?

Next to 'Lightness' and 'Quickness', my favorite lecture is on 'Multiplicity'. No wonder Calvino is inspired by technical-engineer background writers like Gadda and Musil, and he is also enamored by their capacity of excruciating detail. He quotes Gadda, Musil and Proust, all of those authors who never had an ending for their works as a denouement or struggled to have a one, something a game which Calvino would like to play in his literary works. Isn't it ironic and looks like a divine comedy that this book which stands as his final legacy must itself remain unfinished, although each of the chapters is surrealistically complete and conclusive on its own?

But perhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart is something else: Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self,a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter,
To the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to place….

Somewhere else, Calvino wrote almost emphatically, "the less one understands the more posterity will appreciate my profundity of thought. In fact, let me say:

POSTERITY IS STUPID

Think how annoyed they’ll be when they read that!"

Perhaps, Calvino might have treated Posterity with less glory and empathy. But, time, the sure hands of which determines the best, will always treasure Calvino as an original writer, with a voice which movingly spoke for all that is wonderful in human beings, for all the ages to come and even beyond eternity.

References:

1. http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...
2. http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20...

I think my favorites were lightness and multiplicity considering that quickness, exactitude, and visibility seem to be very self-evidently positive qualities of literature (who wants to read a slow, vague, abstract novel?) But the idea of lightness as a positive quality was fresh for me: not lightness as insubstantial but rather, "be light like the bird, not the feather." And the goal of literature as a connector of the wildly disparate knowledges of the modern world, the multiplicity of knowledge in every book, I think is a courageous call to arms, especially if coupled with quickness and lightness.

Calvino occasionally meanders a wee bit too far from his topics in the essays but his digressions are terrifically thought-provoking. His vast knowledge of world literature is also inspiring--he basically provides a list of great authors you should read (if they're good enough for Calvino...).

Although this has the potential to be a little bit too academic for some, I heartily recommend this as caviar for a hungry mind.

Revisiting a great many themes he discussed in The Uses of Literature, he breaks down what he values in reading and writing, and shows examples of the qualities he admires. Throughout, he's an entirely witty, charming commentator. I mean, the categories for literature that he espouses sometimes seem a wee bit arbitrary, but I didn't really care. He makes his case and makes it well.

These high-thinkers that I love so much, they are ridiculously endearing. Borges, Calvino, Woolf, Chesterton, they all think they have direction in their non-fiction, but actually it's just as remarkably convoluted as their fiction. And at this point in my life, I prefer their non-fiction, with the singular, purposeful branch of thought that sprouts a myriad of other little branches, like Daphne from her fingertips.

This book is comprised of lectures that Calvino prepared for Harvard in 1988, illuminating the qualities he most valued in fiction: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. He died, before making the journey and left one lecture on Consistency, that was never committed to paper.

ON LIGHTNESS

- Ovid: On the relationship between Perseus and Medusa, we can learn something more from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Perseus wins another battle: he hacks a sea-monster to pieces with his sword and sets Andromeda free. Now he prepares to do what any of us would do after such an awful chore—he wants to wash his hands. But another problem arises: where to put Medusa's head. And here Ovid has some lines (IV740-752) that seem to me extraordinary in showing how much delicacy of spirit a man must have to be a Perseus, killer of monsters: "So that the rough sand should not harm the snake-haired head" (anquiferumque caput dura ne laedat harena), he makes the ground soft with a bed of leaves, and on top of that he strews little branches of plants born under water, and on this he places Medusa's head, face down. But the most unexpected thing is the miracle that follows: when they touch Medusa, the little marine plants turn into coral and the nymphs, in order to have coral for adornments, rush to bring sprigs and seaweed to the terrible head.

- I am accustomed to consider literature a search for knowledge. In order to move onto existential ground, I have to think of literature as extended to anthropology and ethnology and mythology. In centuries and civilizations closer to us, in villages where the women bore most of the weight of a constricted life, witches flew by night on broomsticks or even on lighter vehicles such as ears of wheat or pieces of straw. Before being codified by the Inquisition, these visions were part of the folk imagination, or we might even say of lived experience. I find it a steady feature in anthropology, this link between the levitation desired and the privation actually suffered. It is this anthropological device that literature perpetuates.

ON MOTION

- Charlemagne: and the legend of his love and necrophilia, much similarity with the legend of King Harald of Norway who slept with his wife wearing a magic cloak that would make her seem alive.

- Borges: achieved the last great invention of a new literary genre: the invention of himself as narrator, that Columbus' egg. The idea was to pretend that the book he wanted to write had already been written by someone else, some unknown hypothetical author—an author in a different language, of a different culture—and that his task was to describe and review this invented book. Part of the Borges legend is the anecdote that when the first extraordinary story written according to this formula, "El acercamiento a Almotasim" (The approach to Almotasim), appeared in the magazine Sur in 1940, it was in fact believed to be a review of a book by an Indian author

ON EXACTITUDE

- Italian is the only language in which the word vago (vague) also means "lovely, attractive." Starting out from the original meaning of "wandering," the word vago still carries an idea of movement and mutability, which in Italian is associated both with uncertainty and indefiniteness and with gracefulness and pleasure.

- L'infinito: Man projects his desire into infinity and feels pleasure only when he is able to imagine that this pleasure has no end. But since the human mind cannot conceive the infinite, and in fact falls back aghast at the very idea of it, it has to make do with what is indefinite, with sensations as they mingle together and create an impression of infinite space, illusory but pleasurable all the same: "E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare" (And sweet to me is foundering in this sea).

- The Man Without Qualities: exactitude and the lack of definition are the poles of philosophical thought that oscillate for Ulrich. Musil's solution, similar to Roland Barthes, is to concieve a science of the unique: : "Pourquoi n'y aurait-il pas, en quelque sorte, une science nouvelle par objet? Une Mathesis singulars et non plus universalis." (Why couldn't there be, in some way, a new science for every object? A mathesis singularis, and no longer universalis?).

- Eugenio Montale: his poem, "L'anguilla", consisting of a single very long sentence in the shape of an eel, following the entire life of the eel, and making the eel into a moral symbol.

- Ponge: the brief texts of Le parti pris des choses (The Purpose of Things), speaking of a shrimp or a pebble or a cake of soap, give us the best example of a battle to force language to become the language of things, starting from things and returning to us changed, with all the humanity that we have invested in things.

ON VISIBILITY

- Dante: "Poi piovve dentro a l'alta fantasia" (Then rained down into the high fantasy). And where do they come from, these thoughts that rain down into the mind's eye?

ON MULTIPLICITY

- Carlo Emilio Gadda: his "Risotto alla Milanese" is a masterpiece of Italian prose.

- The Magic Mountain: the most complete introduction to the culture of its century. All topics in these lectures are subjects discussed in the enclosed space of Berghof. What manifests is an idea of an open encyclopaedia that would, etymologically, enclose the knowledge of the world in a circle. Or a rectangle that is a book.

***

QUOTES:

- "From my youth on, my personal motto has been the old Latin tag, Festina lente, hurry slowly."

- "My cult of Mercury is perhaps merely an aspiration, what I would like to be. I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses."

- "I would answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopaedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable. But perhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart is something else: Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic....."

- "I love Borges because every one of his pieces contains a model of the universe or of
an attribute of the universe (infinity, the innumerable, time eternal or present or cyclic); because
they are texts contained in only a few pages, with an exemplary economy of expression; because
his stories often take the outer form of some genre from popular literature, a form proved by long
usage, which creates almost mythical structures. As an example let us take his most vertiginous
"essay" on time, "El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan" (The Garden of Forking Paths), which is
presented as a spy story and includes a totally logico-metaphysical story, which in turn contains
the description of an endless Chinese novel—and all this concentrated into a dozen pages."

***

Other notable mentions: Da Vinci, Lucretius, de Quincey, Galileo, Vinel's Histoire de notre image (symbolism of tarot cards), Descartes, Guido Cavalcanti (the poet), Boccaccio.
***
Note to future self: do thyself a huge favour by yeeting thyself into Zibaldone...

I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies. Sometimes from cities

At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone

With myths, one should not be in a hurry

It is better to let them settle into the memory

It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware

The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits

Quickness

Death is hidden in clocks

Tristram Shandy does not want to be born, because he does not want to die

Borges was to pretend that the book he wanted to write had already been written by someone else, some unknown hypothetical author

Exactitude

We live in an unending rainfall of images

Much of this cloud of visual images fades at once, like the dreams that leaves no trace in the memory

And what does not fade is a feeling of alienation an discomfort

The poet of vagueness can only be the poet of exactitude

What is unknown is always more attractive than what is known

Man therefore projects his desire into infinity and feels pleasure only when he is able to imagine that this pleasure has no end

There is the word that knows only itself

Depth is hidden. Where? On the surface - Hofmannsthal

The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the thing that is desired or feared

Visibility

Fantasy is a place where it rains

Multiplicity

What tends to emerge from the great novels of the twentieth century is the idea of an open encyclopedia

“My discomfort arises from the loss of form that I notice in life, which I try to oppose with the only weapon I can think of, an idea of literature”

Why it is important to be able to fantasize those things greater than the self, and if this greater collective of ideas and reference points creates a novel of multiplicity or simply confusion. How the use of language in literature allows for a more precise and telling portrayal of the world around us, that we should not be subjugated to the preconcieved images we are too often exposed to. The lightness and nuance with which a novel can approach an emotion or consider an idea, to take it out of the semiotic sphere of science and reason. All these questions were rather like “The Poetics of Space” by Baudelaire tackled in reference to obscure Italian and French poets or novelists.

I might more enjoy his views on literature after having read his own work; till that time I found him too indulgent of his own characterizations and ideas.

To summarize briefly, Italo Calvino chooses six (actually five) traits he would like to see carried forward into a millennium which, alas, he did not live to see.It almost doesn't matter what these traits are: It only matters that Calvino took all of literature and examined it through his jeweler's loupe, showing us new relations, new pathways, that were wrapped in a skein in his prodigious gray matter.

Having just finished this book, I want to go through it slowly, looking for new authors, new works to read. Like his hero Borges (who is also my hero), Calvino functions as a magnificent signpost. I plan on bringing a knapsack, a canteen filled with water, a hiking staff, and a library to follow the many trails marked out by him.

"It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty--that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.
At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of this epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language."

I absolutely LOVED this whole series, even read the essay of “Visibility” twice. It really reflected the popular literature critics saying often used to describe Calvino, “… we see boys growing into men, and girls growing into women, and Italo Calvino growing into an artist.”

This small book is a collection of talks Calvino was preparing for the Norton Professorship of Poetry lecture at Harvard but never got to deliver upon his passing. It consists of important keys of literature that he felt needed to be recorded as crucial elements of literary tradition. Calvino provides the kind of insight and fascination with the making of literature that fuels so many of his best works. There are 5 total lectures titled "Lightness," "Quickness," "Exactitude," "Visibility," and "Multiplicity”. (Esther Calvino clarified in the prologue that she decided to keep the title true to Italo's original intention and publish the series under the original title, despite the missing sixth lecture that was never written.)

In each essay, Calvino explores the invisible working of language, whether it is the expression of poets or scientists, ancients (Ovid, Lucretius), early moderns (Dante, Galileo) and contemporaries ((Borges, Kafka and Kundera). My favorite favorite essay was "Visibility," in which Calvino talked about the power of imagery to convey ideas of storytelling in literature. He brought up his concern for the future of imagination and literature in a world so full of prefabricated imagery, where images are provided rather than solicited. I also enjoyed moments of some dark sarcastic criticism as when he accused schools of dispensing "the culture of the mediocre," also directs a barb or two at the publishing industry when he supports experimentalism with the following caveat: "The demands of the publishing business are a fetish that must not be allowed to keep us from trying out new forms."

Calvino is a writer who has always presented a kind of fascinating enigma. His works is spectacularly visual, and while crucially uncategorizable in its sense of being not easy to nail down in the area of metaphor or theme. Although the last lecture "Consistency" was never written, I could only imagine where he would have gone with it. Perhaps, in the end, the consistency needs to be ours, to make sure that this wisdom does not go to waste.

MUST READ FOR ALL CREATIVES, whether you are in art, literature, fashion or music. I believe his principles apply across the board.

In my opinion these lectures transcend “Goodreads”, these lectures are a must-reads for every serious writer and reader!

The third memo by Italo Calvino – Exactitude – begins as follows:
“For the ancient Egyptians exactitude was symbolised by a feather, that served as a weight on scales used for the weighing of the Soul. This light feather was called “Maat” (also the Dutch word for measure) – Goddess of the scales”.

Italo Calvino begins his memo on “Visibility” with the verses:
“Then rained down into the high fantasy…”.

According to Italo Cavino:
”Rains the “Visibility” – or images – down from heaven; that is, God sends them to the people”.

As clarification of imagination, Italo Calvino quotes the following lines from the Purgatory by Dante:

You, imagination, that prevented us
Many times to perceive the world,
Although around may sound a thousand cymbals

What moved you, outside our sense?
A flash of light, created in heaven,
By itself, or by the will of God.

This is Italo Calvino’s testimony on literature in our Western contemporary world rooted in Christianity.

Highly recommended.

Completed herein are five of the six “memos”: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity with Consistency being the intended sixth. (Interestingly, Calvino discusses Bouvard and Pecuchet (Flaubert’s uncompleted novel) as a form of Multiplicity.) The essays have a conversational tone that belie the weight and enormity of his themes. What he presents is a state of the union address on the future of literature, reconciling the ancient masters to contemporary difficulties and carefully considering where next we must go.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in writing, particularly (non)fiction and poetry. It makes for an excellent companion read with any of his novels. I read it alongside If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler… and was excited to find examples of the various principles presented in Six Memos.

His style is not easy to classify; much of his writing has an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". He wrote: "My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."