Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Title: Six Memos for the Next Millennium: Lightness

Author: Italio Calvino

Link: https://designopendata.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/sixmemosforthenextmillennium_italocalvino.pdf

List of Memos

1. Lightness  
2. Quickness  
3. Exactitude  
4. Visibility  
5. Multiplicity  
6. Consistency  

Summary

Something that isn't stated clearly up front, but should be, is that this whole collection is a set of essays about writing and stories.

Lightness

In this essay, Calvino champions lightness as a significant literary value, viewing it as a deliberate reaction against the "weight, inertia, the opacity of the world". He describes his own writing method as often involving the "subtraction of weight," whether from characters, cities, narrative structures, or language itself. Calvino emphasizes that this lightness is not frivolous but rather thoughtful, precise, and determined. He explores this concept through various literary and mythological examples, starting with Perseus defeating Medusa by using indirect vision and supporting himself on the wind and clouds, symbolizing a way to confront harsh realities without being petrified by them.  

Calvino traces the value of lightness through literature, citing Lucretius' atomistic poetry that perceives the infinite minuteness and mobility within matter, Ovid's Metamorphoses where the world's solidity dissolves through transformations, and the precise, weightless language of Guido Cavalcanti, contrasting it with Dante's grounded style. He finds lightness in Shakespeare's Mercutio and the blending of melancholy and humor, Cyrano de Bergerac's imaginative escape from gravity, and Leopardi's ability to remove weight from language, making it resemble moonlight.  

Ultimately, Calvino connects lightness to an existential need, linking it to the shaman's flight or the witch's levitation as responses to life's hardships. He sees literature as perpetuating this anthropological function, offering a way to escape the "unbearable weight of living". He concludes by invoking Kafka's "The Knight of the Bucket," suggesting that lightness, like the empty bucket symbolizing privation and seeking, allows one to rise above difficulties, even if it doesn't guarantee fulfillment.  

Quickness

In "Quickness," Italo Calvino explores the value of speed in storytelling, thought, and literary style. He begins with the legend of Charlemagne's enchanted ring to illustrate how narrative economy and a swift sequence of events can create a powerful, inescapable rhythm. Calvino expresses admiration for the conciseness and functional logic found in folktales, where time is manipulated—contracted or dilated—to serve the story's needs. He argues that quickness isn't just about pacing but also about mental agility, citing Boccaccio's novella about a clumsy storyteller to show that effective narration depends on rhythm and quick adjustment in thought and expression.

Calvino connects physical speed, like that of horses, to the speed of the mind, referencing Leopardi's appreciation for the exhilarating feeling of velocity and its power to present a rush of simultaneous ideas. He highlights Galileo's assertion that "discoursing is like coursing," emphasizing agility in reasoning, economy of argument, and imaginative examples as hallmarks of good thinking and style. While valuing speed, Calvino also acknowledges the virtues of lingering and digression, as seen in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, viewing digression as a way to lengthen the line between birth and death, a strategy embodied in his personal motto Festina lente (hurry slowly).

He champions short literary forms and the condensed, imaginative power seen in writers like Borges, dreaming of epics reduced to epigrams. Calvino associates quickness with the god Mercury (Hermes), symbolizing communication, agility, and connection. However, he balances this with the necessary qualities of Saturn (contemplation) and Vulcan (focused craftsmanship), suggesting that a writer needs both Mercury's swiftness and Vulcan's patient labor. The memo concludes with a Chuang-tzu parable about drawing a perfect crab in an instant after ten years of preparation, implying that apparent quickness often relies on extensive, unhurried groundwork.

(Also see The Decameron)

Exactitude

In this essay, Calvino defines the value through three aspects: a well-defined plan for the work, the evocation of clear and memorable visual images, and language that is as precise as possible in expressing thoughts and imagination. He writes out of a personal distress regarding the vague and careless use of language he perceives as a "plague" affecting modern communication and even visual culture, leading to a loss of form and substance. Calvino explores the apparent contradiction posed by Leopardi, who praised vagueness ("il vago") as poetic, but argues that Leopardi himself achieved this effect through highly exact and meticulous descriptions of sensory details and atmosphere.

Calvino discusses the inherent tension between the drive for exactitude and the indefinite nature of reality. He sees literary works as attempts to crystallize meaning and form within the chaotic universe, associating exactitude with the symbolic image of the crystal, representing geometric rationality and structure, though acknowledging the complementary value of the flame (representing internal agitation within constant forms). He reflects on his own writing as oscillating between two paths of exactitude: one towards abstract patterns and logical structures, and the other towards capturing the tangible density of the world through precise description.  

He emphasizes the power of precise description, admiring poets like William Carlos Williams and Francis Ponge, the latter seen as a modern Lucretius using words to reconstruct the world's physical nature. Calvino views language as a vital tool, like an "emergency bridge," connecting the visible trace to the absent or invisible thing, demanding discretion and respect for what things communicate without words. He concludes with Leonardo da Vinci's struggle to capture reality through both drawing and painstaking efforts in writing, illustrating the continuous pursuit of exact expression even when facing the infinite complexity of the world.

Visibility

In this essay, Calvino delves into the nature and origin of the visual imagination in literature. He begins by referencing Dante's line about images that "rained down into the high fantasy," exploring the idea of imagination as a receptive space for visions, whether divinely inspired or arising from other sources. Calvino distinguishes between imaginative processes that start with words and lead to images (like reading) and those that begin with a visual image and seek verbal expression. He discusses the "mental cinema" inherent in everyone, citing Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises as a striking example of using detailed, visualized scenes as a core part of meditation and spiritual understanding.

Calvino reflects on his own writing process, particularly for his fantastic stories, stating that they almost always originate from a specific visual image that strikes him as meaningful, even if its meaning isn't immediately clear. This initial image then develops its own potential, generating related images and concepts, which he consciously shapes through narrative structure and through the process of writing itself, where the search for the right words gradually takes precedence.

Ultimately, Calvino describes his method as uniting spontaneous visual logic with rational intention. While acknowledging the value of imagination as an instrument of knowledge, he sees it as a way to access something beyond the individual self, connecting with a broader potentiality. He defines imagination as a vital "repertory of what is potential, what is hypothetical," a realm of the possible and impossible that is crucial for both artistic creation and scientific discovery, acting like a machine that sorts through infinite combinations.

Multiplicity

In this essay, Calvino champions the contemporary novel as an encyclopedia, a method of knowledge that embraces the world's complexity by representing it as a network of interconnected events, people, and things. He highlights the view that events arise not from a single cause but from a "multitude of converging causes," a "knot or tangle". Calvino sees this embrace of multiplicity, this attempt to weave together diverse knowledge and codes, as the grand challenge and vital function of modern literature.

Calvino contrasts the contained, ordered totality often sought in medieval literature (like Dante's Commedia) with the modern preference for the "open encyclopedia," works characterized by a clash of perspectives and styles whose richness lies in their centrifugal force rather than harmonious closure. Borges is lauded for creating models of the universe's multiplicity and infinite possibilities within concise, economical texts.  

This leads Calvino to discuss the concept of the "hyper-novel," which attempts to capture potential multiplicity (Georges Perec's Life, Directions for Use). He admires Perec's novel for its vast, yet finished, structure built on rigorous constraints (like moving chapter-by-chapter through rooms in an apartment building based on a knight's tour on a chessboard) and encyclopedic lists, arguing these rules paradoxically stimulate narrative freedom and invention. Ultimately, Calvino suggests that the self is a "combinatoria" of experiences and information, and literature's potential lies in reflecting this multifaceted reality, even striving to give voice to the non-human world.

Quotes

Lightness

These lectures are dense, rigorous, and seemingly full of contradiction. The first is a paean to lightness (though “light like a bird,” as Paul Valéry wrote, “and not like a feather”). Lightness is followed by quickness (without “presum[ing] to deny the pleasures of lingering”), exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. The perfect antidote to writerly laziness.

With myths, one should not be in a hurry. It is better to let them settle into the memory, to stop and dwell on every detail, to reflect on them without losing touch with their language of images. The lesson we can learn from a myth lies in the literal narrative, not in what we add to it from the outside.

The relationship between Perseus and the Gorgon is a complex one and does not end with the beheading of the monster. Medusa's blood gives birth to a winged horse, Pegasus - the heaviness of stone is transformed into its opposite. (Even the winged sandals, incidentally, come from the world of monsters, for Perseus obtained them from Medusa's sisters, the Graiae, who had one tooth and one eye among them).

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that i have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification. The images of lightness that I seek should not fade away like dreams dissolved by the realities of present and future...

Then we have computer science. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of hte software and evolve so that htey can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with "bits' in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.

Lucretius set out to write the poem of physical matter, but he warns us at the outset that this matter is made up of invisible particles. He is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies. Lucretius' chief concern is to prevent the weight of matter from crushing us. Even while laying down the rigorous mechanical laws that determine every event, he feels the need to allow atoms to make unpredictable deviations from the straight line, thereby ensuring freedom both to atoms and to human beings.

From what I have said so far, I think the concept of lightness is beginning to take shape. Above all I hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know that there is a lightness of frivolity. In fact, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.

Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing 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, revving and roaring - belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars.

Quickness

Literature has worked out various techniques for slowing down the course of time. I have already mentioned repetition, and now I will say a word about digression.

In practical life, time is a form of wealth with which we are stingy. In literature, time is a form of wealth to be spent at leisure and with detachment. We don't have to be first past a predetermined finish line. On the contrary, saving time is a good thing because the more time we save, the more we can afford to lose.

Laurence Sterne's great invention was the novel that is completely composed of digressions, an example followed by Diderot.

If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fated and inevitable points, digressions will lengthen it; and if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and tortuous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows - perhaps death may not find us, perhaps time will lose its way, and perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places.

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

The idea that came to Borges 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...

In the same way, critics of Borges feel bound to observe that each of his texts doubles or multiplies its own space through the medium of other books belonging to a real or imaginary library, whether they be classical, erudite, or merely invented.

What I particularly wish to stress is how Borges achieves his approaches to the infinite without the least congestion, in the most crystalline, sober, and airy style. In the same way, his synthetic, sidelong manner of narration brings with it a language that is everywhere concrete and precise... Borges has created a literature raised to the second power and, at the same time, a literature that is like the extraction of the square root of itself.

Conciseness is only one aspect of hte subject I want to deal with, and 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 the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought.

Borges and Bioy Casares put together an anthology of short extraordinary tales (Cuentos breves y extraordinarios, 1955). I would like to edit a collection of tales consisting of one sentence only, or even a single line. But so far I haven't found any to match the one by the Guatemalan writer Augosto Monterroso: "When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there."

André Virel's Historie de noitre image (1965): Merceury and Vulcan represent hte two inseparable and complementary functions of life: Mercury represents syntony, or participation in the world around us; Vulcan, focalization or constructive concentration. Mercury and Vulcan are both sons of Jupiter, whose realm is that of the consciousness, individual and social.

But on his mother's side Mercury is a descendant of Uranus, whose kingdom was that of hte "cyclophrenic" age of undifferentiated continuity. And Vulcan is descended from Saturn, whose realm was that of the "schizophrenic" era of egocentric isolation.

Vulcan's concentration and craftsmanship are needed to record Mercury's adventures and metamorphoses. Mercury's swiftness and mobility are needed to make Vulcan's endless labors become bearers of meaning. And from the formless mineral matrix, the gods' symbo.ls of office acquire their forms: lyres or tridents, spears or diadems.

Among Chuang-tzu's many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later, the drawing was still not begun. "I need another five years," said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.

Exactitude

The point at which Musil comes closest to a possible solution is when he mentions the fact that mathematical problems do not admit of a general solution, but that particular solutions, taken all together, can lead to a general solution. He thinks that this method might be applied to human life.

Many years later another writer, Roland Barthes, in whose mind the demon of exactitude lived side by side with the demon of sensitivity, asked himself if it would not be possible to conceive of a science of the unique and unrepeatable: "Why couldn't there be, in some way, a new science for every object? A mathesis singularis, and no longer universalis?"