Six Memos for the Next Milennium

↻ 2026-09-02

Picnic read, and yet a 5/5. Get a blanket, steal a dog, skip the food because someone in the park will sell you baklava if you wait long enough.

This is the Calvino version of This Craft of Verse (Borges) and it’s a lot of fun. The kind of book which expands your reading list because of its irresistable citations. For having read this, I am obliged now to read Paolo Zellini, Dante Aligheri, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Thomas Mann, Georges Perec, and perhaps Alfred Jarry (if I can find a translation).

There are five essays: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity. Calvino died with this work in progress.

Multiplicity is my favorite, though I am partial for its references to Joyce and Borges.

Quickness contains a neat exposition of a story about Charlemagne, with different versions featuring different cadences by virtue of elaboration upon or omission of various themes. Calvino pragmatically and convincingly demonstrates how this cadence impacts a story.

Tons of notable passages,

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 bath 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.

Quickness, p. 45

On the innovation of art,

…we see how the sluggishness of the human consciousness in emerging from its anthropocentric parochialism can be abolished in an instant by poetic invention.

Lightness, p. 22

On the lapidary work of editing,

On folio 265 of the Codex Atlanticus, Leonardo begins to jot down evidence to prove a theory of the growth of the earth.

After giving examples of buried cities swallowed up by the soil, he goes on to the marine fossils found in the mountains and in particular to certain bones that he supposes must have belonged to an antediluvian sea monster. At this moment his imagination must have been caught by a vision of the immense animal as it was swimming among the waves. At any rate, he turns the page upside down and tries to capture the image of the animal, three times attempting a sentence that will convey all the wonder of that evocation.

“O how many times were you seen among the waves of the great swollen ocean, with your black and bristly back, looming like a mountain, and with grave and stately bearing!”

Then he tries to give more movement to the monster’s progress by introducing the verb volteggiare (to whirl).

“And many times were you seen among the waves of the great swollen ocean, and with stately and grave bearing go swirling in the sea waters. And with your black and bristly back, looming like a mountain, defeating and overwhelming them!”

But the word volteggiare seems to him to have lessened the impression of grandeur and majesty that he wants to evoke. So he chooses the verb solcare (to furrow) and alters the whole construction of the passage, giving it compactness and rhythm with sure literary judgment:

O how many times were you seen among the waves of the great swollen ocean, looming like a mountain, defeating and overwhelming them, and with your black and bristly back furrowing the sea waters, and with stately and grave bearing!

His pursuit of the apparition, which is presented almost as a symbol of the solemn force of nature, gives us an inkling of how Leonardo’s imagination worked. I leave you this image at the very end of my talk so that you may carry it in your memories as long as possible, in all its transparency and its mystery.

Exactitude, p. 79-80

Oh, and Dante has beautiful words.

Come per acqua cupa cosa grave / (Like some heavy thing in deep water)

Paradiso III.123

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