Six Memos for the Next Millennium (6 page)
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Authors: Italo Calvino
Glance of eye, thought of man, wing of angel, which of these had speed enough to sweep between the question and the answer, and divide the one from the other? Light does not tread upon the steps of light more indivisibly than did our all-conquering arrival upon the escaping efforts of the gig.
De Quincey succeeds in conveying a sense of an extremely short period of time that nonetheless contains both the calculation of the technical inevitability of the crash and the imponderable— God's part in the matter—in virtue of which the two vehicles do not collide.
The motif that interests us here is not physical speed, but the relationship between physical speed and speed of mind. This was also interesting to a great Italian poet of De Quincey's generation. Giacomo Leopardi, whose youth was as sedentary as one can imagine, struck a rare joyful moment when he wrote in his diary, the
Zibaldone di pensieri
(Casual Thoughts):
La velocita, per esempio, de' cavalli o veduta, o sperimen-tata, cioe quando essi vi trasportano … e piacevolissima per se sola, cioe per la vivacita, Penergia, la forza, la vita di tal sensazione. Essa desta realmente una quasi idea delP infinito, sublima Panima, la fortifica … (27 Ottobre 1821).
Speed, for example, of horses, whether seen or experienced, that is, when they are carrying you … is most pleasurable in itself; that is, for the vivacity, the energy, the strength, the sheer life of such a feeling. Indeed it almost gives you an idea of the infinite—elevates the soul, fortifies it.
In his notes in the
Zibaldone
over the following few months, Leopardi develops his reflections on the subject of speed, and at a certain point starts to speak about literary style:
La rapidità e la concisione dello stile, piace perche presenta all'anima una folia d'idee simultanee, o cosi rapidamente succedentisi, che paiono simultanee, e fanno ondeggiar Panima in una tale abbondanza di pensieri, o d'immagini e sensazioni spirituali, ch'ella o non e capace di abbracciarle
tutte, e pienamente ciascuna, o non ha tempo di restare in ozio, e priva di sensazioni. La forza dello stile poetico, che in gran parte e tutt'uno colla rapidita, non e piacevole per altro che per questi effetti, e non consiste in altro. L'ecci-tamento d'idee simultanee, puo derivare e da ciascuna pa-rola isolata, o propria o metaforica, e dalla loro colloca-zione, e dal giro della frase, e dalla soppressione stessa di altre parole o frasi ec. (3 Novembre 1821).
Speed and conciseness of style please us because they present the mind with a rush of ideas that are simultaneous, or that follow each other so quickly they seem simultaneous, and set the mind afloat on such an abundance of thoughts or images or spiritual feelings that either it cannot embrace them all, each one fully, or it has no time to be idle and empty of feelings. The power of poetic style, which is largely the same thing as rapidity, is pleasing for these effects alone and consists in nothing else. The excitement of simultaneous ideas may arise either from each isolated word, whether literal or metaphorical, from their arrangement, from the turn of a phrase, or even from the suppression of other words and phrases.
The metaphor of the horse for the speed of thought was, I think, first used by Galileo Galilei. In the
Saggiatore
(The Tester), arguing with an adversary who propped up his own theories with a vast number of classical quotations, he wrote:
Se il discorrere circa un problema difficile fosse come il portar pesi, dove molti cavalli porteranno piu sacca di grano che un caval solo, io acconsentirei che i molti discorsi facesser piu che un solo; ma il discorrere e come il correre, e non come il portare, ed un caval barbero solo correra piu che cento frisoni. (45)
If discoursing on a difficult problem were like carrying weights, when many horses can carry more sacks of grain than a single horse, I would agree that many discourses would do more than a single one; but discoursing is like coursing, not like carrying, and one Barbary courser can go faster than a hundred Frieslands.
“Discoursing,” or “discourse,” for Galileo means reasoning, and very often deductive reasoning. “Discoursing is like coursing”: this statement could be Galileo's declaration of faith—style as a method of thought and as literary taste. For him, good thinking means quickness, agility in reasoning, economy in argument, but also the use of imaginative examples.
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.