Six Memos for the Next Millennium

by Italo Calvino

  There is also a certain predilection for the horse in Galileo's metaphors and Gedanken-Experimenten. In a study I once made on metaphor in Galileo, I counted at least eleven significant examples in which he talks of horses—as an image of motion, and therefore as an instrument in kinetic experiments; as a form of nature in all its complexity and also in all its beauty; as a form that sparks off the imagination in the hypothetical situation of horses subjected to the most unlikely trials or growing to gigantic proportions—and all this apart from the comparison of reasoning with racing: “Discoursing is like coursing.”

  In the Dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems), speed of thought is personified by Sa-gredo, a character who intervenes in the discussion between the Ptolomaic Simplicio and the Copernican Salviati. Salviati and Sa-gredo represent two different facets of Galileo's temperament. Salviati is the rigorously methodical reasoner, who proceeds slowly and with prudence; Sagredo, with his “swift manner of speech” and more imaginative way of seeing things, draws conclusions that have not been demonstrated and pushes every idea to its extreme consequences. It is Sagredo who makes hypotheses on how life might be on the moon or what would happen if the earth stopped turning. But it is Salviati who defines the scale of values in which Galileo places quickness of mind. Instantaneous reasoning without passaggi (transitions) is the reasoning of God's mind, infinitely superior to the mind of man, which however should not be despised or considered nothing, insofar as it was created by God, and in the course of time has investigated and understood and achieved wonderful things. At this point Sagredo breaks in with an encomium on the greatest human invention, the alphabet:

  Ma sopra tutte le invenzioni stupende, qual eminenza di mente fu quella di colui che s'immagino di trovar modo di comunicare i suoi piu reconditi pensieri a qualsivoglia altra persona, benche distante per lunghissimo intervallo di luogo e di tempo? parlare con quelli che son nelPlndie, parlare a que li che non sono ancora nati ne saranno se non di qua a mille e dieci mila anni? e con qual facilita? con i vari accozzamenti di venti caratteruzzi sopra una carta. (End of the first day)

  But above all stupendous inventions, what eminence of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, no matter how far distant in place and time? Of speaking with those who are in India, of speaking with those who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten thousand years? And with what facility? All by using the various arrangements of twenty little characters on a page!

  In my last talk, on lightness, I quoted Lucretius, who in the combinatoria of the alphabet saw a model of the impalpable atomic structure of matter. Now I quote Galileo who, in the combinatoria of the alphabet (“the various arrangements of twenty little characters on a page”), saw the ultimate instrument of communication. Communication with people distant in place and time, says Galileo; but we should also add the immediate connection that writing establishes between everything existent or possible.

  Since in each of my lectures I have set myself the task of recommending to the next millennium a particular value close to my heart, the value I want to recommend today is precisely this: In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

  The motor age has forced speed on us as a measurable quantity, the records of which are milestones in the history of the progress of both men and machines. But mental speed cannot be measured and does not allow comparisons or competitions; nor can it display its results in a historical perspective. Mental speed is valuable for its own sake, for the pleasure it gives to anyone who is sensitive to such a thing, and not for the practical use that can be made of it. A swift piece of reasoning is not necessarily better than a long-pondered one. Far from it. But it communicates something special that is derived simply from its very swiftness.

  I said at the beginning that each value or virtue I chose as the subject for my lectures does not exclude its opposite. Implicit in my tribute to lightness was my respect for weight, and so this apologia for quickness does not presume to deny the pleasures of lingering. 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 do not 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. Quickness of style and thought means above all agility, mobility, and ease, all qualities that go with writing where it is natural to digress, to jump from one subject to another, to lose the thread a hundred times and find it again after a hundred more twists and turns.

  Laurence Sterne's great invention was the novel that is completely composed of digressions, an example followed by Diderot. The digression is a strategy for putting off the ending, a multiplying of time within the work, a perpetual evasion or flight. Flight from what? From death, of course, says Carlo Levi, in an introduction he wrote to an Italian edition of Tristram Shandy. Few people would imagine Levi to be an admirer of Sterne, but actually his own secret lay precisely in bringing a spirit of digression and a feeling of unlimited time even to the observation of social problems. Levi writes:

  L'orologio è il primo simbolo di Shandy. Sotto il suo influsso i viene generato, ed iniziano le sue disgrazie, che sono tutt'uno con questo segno del tempo. La morte sta nascosta negli orologi, come diceva il Belli; e l'infelicita della vita individuale, di questo frammento, di questa cosa scissa e disgregata, e priva di totalita: la morte, che e il tempo, il tempo della individuazione, della separazione, Pastratto tempo che rotola verso la sua fine. Tristram Shandy non vuol nascere, perche non vuol morire. Tutti i mezzi, tutte le armi sono buone per salvarsi dalla morte e dal tempo. Se la linea retta e la piu breve fra due punti fatali e inevitabili, le digressioni la allungheranno: e se queste digressioni di-venteranno cosi complesse, aggrovigliate, tortuose, cosi ra-pide da far perdere le proprie tracce, chissa che la morte non ci trovi piu, che il tempo si smarrisca, e che possiamo restare celati nei mutevoli nascondigli.

  The clock is Shandy's first symbol. Under its influence he is conceived and his misfortunes begin, which are one and the same with this emblem of time. Death is hidden in clocks, as Belli said; and the unhappiness of individual life, of this fragment, of this divided, disunited thing, devoid of wholeness: death, which is time, the time of individuation, of separation, the abstract time that rolls toward its end. Tristram Shandy does not want to be born, because he does not want to die. Every means and every weapon is valid to save oneself from death and time. 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.

  Words, words that make me think. Because I am not devoted to aimless wandering, I'd rather say that I prefer to entrust myself to the straight line, in the hope that the line will continue into infinity, making me unreachable. I prefer to calculate at length the trajectory of my flight, expecting that I will be able to launch myself like an arrow and disappear over the horizon. Or else, if too many obstacles bar my way, to calculate the series of rectilinear segments that will lead me out of the labyrinth as quickly as possible.

  From my youth on, my personal motto has been the old Latin tag, Festina lente, hurry slowly. Perhaps what attracted me, even more than the words and the idea, was the suggestiveness
of its emblems. You may recall that the great Venetian humanist publisher, Aldus Manutius, on all his title pages symbolized the motto Festina lente by a dolphin in a sinuous curve around an anchor. The intensity and constancy of intellectual work are represented in that elegant graphic trademark, which Erasmus of Rotterdam commented on in some memorable pages. But both dolphin and anchor belong to the same world of marine emblems, and I have always preferred emblems that throw together incongruous and enigmatic figures, as in a rebus. Such are the butterfly and crab that illustrate Festina lente in the sixteenth-century collection of emblems by Paolo Giovio. Butterfly and crab are both bizarre, both symmetrical in shape, and between them establish an unexpected kind of harmony.

  My work as a writer has from the beginning aimed at tracing the lightning flashes of the mental circuits that capture and link points distant from each other in space and time. In my love of adventure stories and fairytales, I have always searched for the equivalent of some inner energy, some motion of the mind. I have always aimed at the image and the motion that arises naturally from the image, while still being aware that one cannot speak of a literary result until this stream of imagination has been turned into words. Just as for the poet writing verse, so it is for the prose writer: success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search for the mot juste, for the sentence in which every word is unalterable, the most effective marriage of sounds and concepts. I am convinced that writing prose should not be any different from writing poetry. In both cases it is a question of looking for the unique expression, one that is concise, concentrated, and memorable.

  It is hard to keep up tension of this kind in very long works. However, by temperament I feel myself more at ease in short pieces: much of my work consists of short stories. For example, the sort of thing I tried out in Cosmicomics (Le costnicomiche) and t zero (Tcon zero)—giving narrative form to abstract ideas of space and time—could not be brought off except within the brief span of a short story. But I have experimented with even shorter compositions, with narrative on a smaller scale, something between a fable and a petit poeme en prose, in my book Invisible Cities (Le citta invisibili) and more recently in my descriptions in Palomar. Of course the length or brevity of a text is an external criterion, but I am speaking of a particular density that, even if it can be attained in narratives of broader scope, nevertheless finds its proper dimension in the single page.

  In this preference for short literary forms I am only following the true vocation of Italian literature, which is poor in novelists but rich in poets, who even when they write in prose give of their best in texts where the highest degree of invention and thought is contained in a few pages. This is the case with a book unparalleled in other literatures: Leopardi's Operette morali (Essays and Dialogues). American literature has a glorious and thriving tradition of short stories, and indeed I would say that its most precious gems are to be found there. But the rigid distinction made by publishers—either short story or novel—excludes other possible short forms (which still may be found in the prose works of the great American poets, from Walt Whitman's Specimen Days to many pages of William Carlos Williams). The demands of the publishing business are a fetish that must not be allowed to keep us from trying out new forms. I should like at this point to break a lance on the field for the richness of short literary forms, with all they imply in terms of style and concentration of content. I am thinking of the Paul Valery of Monsieur Teste and many of his essays, of the prose poems that Francis Ponge wrote about objects, of Michel Leiris' explorations of himself and his own language, of Henri Michaux's mysterious and hallucinatory humor in the very brief stories in Plume.

  The last great invention of a new literary genre in our time was achieved by a master of the short form, Jorge Luis Borges. It was the invention of himself as narrator, that “Columbus' egg,” which enabled him to get over the mental block that until nearly forty years of age prevented him from moving beyond essays to fiction. 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. 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 Al'Mutasim), appeared in the magazine Sur in 1940, it was in fact believed to be a review of a book by an Indian author. 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 syn- thetic, sidelong manner of narration brings with it a language that is everywhere concrete and precise, whose inventiveness is shown in the variety of rhythms, the syntactic movements, the unfailingly surprising and unexpected adjectives. 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. It is a “potential literature,” to use a term applied later on in France. The first signs of this may be found in Ficciones, in the little hints and formulas of what might have become the works of a hypothetical author called Herbert Quain.

  Conciseness is only one aspect of the 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 brevesy 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 Augusto Monterroso: “Cuando desperto, el dinosauro todavia estaba alii” (When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there).

  I realize that this talk, based as it is on invisible connections, has wandered off in many directions and is risking dispersion. But all the subjects I have dealt with this evening, and perhaps those from last time, might indeed be united in that they are all under the sign of an Olympian god whom I particularly honor: Hermes-Mercury, god of communication and mediation, who under the name of Thoth was the inventor of writing and who— according to C. G. Jung in his studies on alchemical symbolism— in the guise of “spirit Mercury” also represents the principium individuationis. Mercury with his winged feet, light and airborne, astute, agile, adaptable, free and easy, established the relationships of the gods among themselves and those between the gods and men, between universal laws and individual destinies, between the forces of nature and the forms of culture, between the objects of the world and all thinking subjects. What better patron could I possibly choose to support my proposals for literature?

  For the ancients, who saw microcosm and macrocosm mirrored in the correspondences between psychology and astrology, between humours, temperaments, planets, and constellations, Mercury's nature was the most indefinite and variable. But, in the more widespread view, the temperament influenced by Mercury, inclined toward exchanges and commerce and dexterity, was contrasted with the temperament influenced by Saturn, seen as melancholy, contemplative, and solitary. Ever since antiquity it has been thought that the saturnine temperament is the one proper to artists, poets, and thinkers, and that seems true enough. Certainly literature would never have existed if some human beings had not been strongly inclined to introversion, discontented with the world as it is, inclined to forget themselves for hours and days on end and to fix their gaze on the immobility of silent words. Certainly my own character corresponds to the tradit
ional features of the guild to which I belong. I too have always been saturnine, whatever other masks I have attempted to wear. 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.

  But if Saturn-Chronos does exercise some power over me, it is also true that he is not one of my favorite divinities. I have never nourished any feeling for him other than a timorous respect. There is, however, another god with family ties to Saturn for whom I feel much affection. He is a god who does not enjoy too much astrological and therefore psychological prestige, since his name was not given to one of the seven planets in the skies of the ancients, but still he has been well treated in literature from Homer on. I am speaking of Vulcan—Hephaestus, a god who does not roam the heavens but lurks at the bottom of craters, shut up in his smithy, where he tirelessly forges objects that are the last word in refinement: jewels and ornaments for the gods and goddesses, weapons, shields, nets, traps. To Mercury's aerial flight, Vulcan replies with his limping gait and the rhythmic beat of his hammer.

  Here too I have to refer to some occasional reading of mine— from time to time enlightening ideas emerge from reading odd books that are hard to classify from a rigorously academic point of view. The book in question, which I read while studying the symbolism of the tarot, is Andre Virel's Histoire de notre image (1965). According to the author—a student of the collective imagination in what I take to be the school of Jung—Mercury and Vulcan represent the two inseparable and complementary functions of life: Mercury represents syntony, or participation in the world around us; Vulcan, Jocalization 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 the “cyclophrenic” age of undifferentiated continuity. And Vulcan is descended from Saturn, whose realm was that of the “schizophrenic” era of egocentric isolation. Saturn dethroned Uranus, and Jupiter dethroned Saturn. In the end, in the well-balanced, luminous realm of Jupiter, both Mercury and Vulcan carry with them the memory of some dark primordial realm, changing what had been a destructive malady into something positive: syntony and focalization.