We spent the tail end of 2022 reading Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which is a set of Norton Lectures Calvino was preparing to give at Harvard in 1985-1986. He died before he could deliver them, and only five of the six memos were finished. The published book contains those five: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity.
The book is short. It is also incredibly dense. These are lectures about what Calvino thought literature needed to carry into the next thousand years, and they read less like a set of essays and more like an attempt to name and preserve a handful of properties before they slip out of the culture.
This post is a small selection of notes on the first two memos - Lightness and Quickness - which are the two that hit hardest for us on this reading.
Lightness
Lightness, as Calvino uses the word, is not the same as frivolity. He is very careful about this. It is closer to what Valéry meant when he wrote about being "light like a bird, and not like a feather" - a chosen agility of thought, as opposed to weightlessness by default.
The image Calvino returns to over and over is Perseus and the Gorgon. Perseus cannot look directly at Medusa without being turned to stone. He has to look at her reflection in his polished shield. Then, once he has beheaded her, her blood gives birth to Pegasus - the winged horse. The heaviness of stone transforms into flight. Even the winged sandals that let Perseus fly came from the world of monsters, from Medusa's sisters the Graiae, who shared one tooth and one eye between the three of them.
The point Calvino is making is that lightness is not the absence of weight. It is a response to weight. Perseus does not pretend the monster is not there. He looks at it sideways, in a mirror, and finds a way to carry it that does not destroy him.
There is a passage in the Lightness lecture that we have thought about often since reading it:
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.
Calvino also has a very unexpected riff on software. Remember, this is 1985. He writes about the second industrial revolution not producing the "crushing images" of rolling mills and molten steel, but bits traveling along circuits as electronic impulses:
The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.
For a set of lectures written in 1985 by an Italian novelist, that reads as unsettlingly current. Substitute "large language model" for "bits" and it barely changes.
The lecture ends with a memorable image, which we will just quote:
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
The Quickness lecture is the one that made us laugh out loud a few times.
Calvino's central paradox in this memo is that quickness in literature is often produced by slowing down. He talks about Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy - a novel that is essentially all digression, and which Diderot then took as a model - and argues that digression is one of the main techniques literature has developed for slowing time down:
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.
He follows this with a wonderful line about digressions as a hiding place:
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.
And then his personal motto, which is now our personal motto too:
From my youth on, my personal motto has been the old Latin tag, festina lente, hurry slowly.
The best story in the Quickness lecture, though, is the one about Chuang-tzu and the crab. Here is Calvino's telling in full:
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.
This is the whole book in a paragraph. Quickness is the payoff of an enormous investment of slowness. The single stroke exists because of the ten years of preparation. Speed is a property that expensive preparation lets you buy, and cheap speed is not the same thing at all.
Why We Wrote This Down
Our reason for keeping notes on this book is that Calvino is doing something we recognize from our own attempts to build a zettelkasten - he is trying to name properties of thought that are useful, so they can be carried forward and returned to.
Lightness. Quickness. Exactitude. Visibility. Multiplicity. Those are five words to keep on the wall.
References
- Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Translated by Patrick Creagh. Harvard University Press, 1988.
- Our wiki notes: https://charlesreid1.com/wiki/Six_Memos_for_the_Next_Millennium