American Lessons by Italo Calvino
Artwork by Linda Flaviani
6 June 1984.
Calvino, officially invited by Harvard University to give the “Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures”, he decides to focus key literary values to be preserved in the millennium to come. Unfortunately, he will not be able to hold these lectures: he will die before elaborating the sixth one.
The first written edition of these “memos” came out posthumously in 1988, published by Garzanti in Milan.
[1] lightness
“At times it seemed to me that the world was turning to stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places, but sparing no aspect of life. It was as if no one could escape the Medusa’s inexorable gaze. [...] At times when the human realm seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into another space.”
[2] quickness
“[...] events, regardless of their duration, become punctiform, connected by straight segments, in a zigzag pattern that corresponds to unabated movement. [...] “If the straight line is the shortest between two fatal and inevitable points, digressions will lengthen it: and if these digressions become so complex, tangled, tortuous, so rapid that they lose their traces, who knows, death may no longer find us, time may get lost, and we may remain hidden in the changing hiding places.” [...] But in the increasingly congested times ahead, the need for literature will have to focus on the utmost concentration of poetry and thought.”
[3] exactitude
“Sometimes it seems to me that a pestilential epidemic has struck humanity in the faculty that most characterises it, namely the use of words, a plague of language that manifests itself as a loss of cognitive power and immediacy [...]. The plague also affects the lives of people and the history of nations, making all histories shapeless, random, confused, without beginning or end. My discomfort is due to the loss of form that I notice in life, and to which I try to oppose the only defence I can conceive: an idea of literature. [...] And then another vertigo takes hold of me, that of the detail of the detail of the detail [...].”
[4] visibility
“Fantasy is a place where it rains in. [...] If I have included Visibility in my list of values to save, it is to warn of the danger that we are running of losing a fundamental human faculty: the power to focus visions with our eyes closed, to bring forth colours and shapes from the alignment of black alphabetical characters on a white page, to think in images. [...] Will fantastic literature be possible in the year 2000, in an increasing inflation of prefabricated images?”
[5] multiplicity
“What takes shape in the great novels of the twentieth century is the idea of an open encyclopaedia, an adjective that certainly contradicts the noun encyclopaedia, born etymologically from the claim to exhaust knowledge of the world by enclosing it in a circle. Today it is no longer possible to think of a totality that is not potential, conjectural, multiple. [...] Even if the general design has been meticulously planned, what counts is not its enclosure in a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force that emanates from it, the plurality of languages as a guarantee of a non-partial truth.”
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