Thus Perseus comes to my aid even at this moment, just as I too am about to be caught in a vise of stone–which happens every time I try to speak about my own past. The only hero able to cut off Medusa’s head is Perseus, who flies with winged sandals Perseus, who does not turn his gaze upon the face of the Gorgon but only upon her image reflected in his bronze shield. It was as if no one could escape the inexorable stare of Medusa. Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world–qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.Īt certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spared no aspect of life. Soon I became aware that between the facts of life that should have been my raw materials and the quick light touch I wanted for my writing, there was a gulf that cost me increasing effort to cross. I tried to find some harmony between the adventurous, picaresque inner rhythm that prompted me to write and the frantic spectacle of the world, sometimes dramatic and sometimes grotesque.
ITALO CALVINO QUICKNESS FULL
Full of good intentions, I tried to identify myself with the ruthless energies propelling the events of our century, both collective and individual. When I began my career, the categorical imperative of every young writer was to represent his own time. In this talk I shall try to explain-both to myself and to you-why I have come to consider lightness a value rather than a defect to indicate the works of the past in which I recognize my ideal of lightness and to show where I situate this value in the present and how I project it into the future. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. I would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. This does not mean that I consider the virtues of weight any less compelling, but simply that I have more to say about lightness.Īfter forty years of writing fiction, after exploring various roads and making diverse experiments, the time has come for me to look for an overall definition of my work. I will devote my first lecture to the opposition between lightness and weight, and will uphold the values of lightness.
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