The distance of the moon italo calvino summary

#The distance of the moon italo calvino summary series

If I were to extend this invitation to include ''Six Memos for the Next Millennium,'' the first frame would be dominated by the lightly leaping poet-philosopher.

#The distance of the moon italo calvino summary series

His own ''fantastic iconologies,'' he confesses, had their roots in his preliterate ''obsessive porings over pages and pages of cartoons'' and in one of the Qwfwg stories in the ''T Zero'' collection (''The Origin of the Birds''), he invites us to imagine the story he's telling us as a series of frames in a comic strip. Palomar's lawn.ДЄt the very least, it answers to Calvino's insistence on the priority of the visual image. It seems to me a whole esthetic is hidden away in it, and a biography as well, like the universe hiding in Mr. belongs to the realm of death.''ДЄnd if I were to choose a quintessential image for the author of such crystalline models of ''weightless gravity'' as ''The Nonexistent Knight,'' ''Cosmicomics,'' ''Invisible Cities'' and ''If on a Winter's Night a Traveler'' - classics of this millennium that the next will surely cherish - out of the many here, I would perhaps choose this one, the leaping poet. ''Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium,'' Calvino goes on to say, ''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. While each of these literary values is distinct, each seems at the same time to embrace the others, ''visibility'' emerging from ''lightness,'' ''exactitude'' making ''quickness'' possible, all the qualities caught up in ''multiplicity's'' net or in ''visibility's'' inner eye - it's a kind of magic act resembling the threading of the cosmos on an endless loop through the eye of a needle - in such a way that summary images of the art of writing, at least that practiced by Calvino himself, are to be found on almost every page.Д®arly in the first ''memo,'' for example, Calvino recalls the story from Boccaccio's ''Decameron'' about the poet Guido Cavalcanti, who, while meditating among the tombs, is surprised and surrounded by a frivolous posse of mounted partygoers intent on harassing him: ''Guido, you refuse to be of our company but look, when you have proved that there is no God, what will you have accomplished?'' Whereupon Cavalcanti lightly ''rises above'' them in three different ways: first, by the quickness and seeming airiness of his reply (''Gentlemen, you may say anything you wish to me in your own home'' - meaning the tombs, of course) second, by the implicit and subtle reference to his own philosophy, which is itself a ''rising above'' (an overcoming of individual bodily death by conjoining the individual soul, through contemplation, with the universal intellect this is not his home) and, third, by ''resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble,'' literally leaping over the tomb and out of their midst. A sixth - Calvino's provocative open-endedness - is ironically provided by the absence of the unwritten final lecture, which was to have been titled ''Consistency.'' As though, in effect, he were being. ''Exactitude,'' ''Visibility,'' ''Multiplicity'' - amount to a recital of Calvino's most admired characteristics, qualities echoed here in Patrick Creagh's sensitive translation. The very titles here - ''Lightness,'' ''Quickness,'' Walled in by their own despotic metaphors and scruffy unwashed visions, barely able to glimpse beyond them the light of day (is it day?), what else after all can they do? Which may, indeed, account for the general irrelevance of most literary critics the body of work to which their judgments and speculations must in reality apply is missing.Д¬ertainly no one has written so well about that gifted and nimble Italian genius of the short prose narrative Italo Calvino as has the master himself in these five highly personal meditations on the art of writing, originally intended for the 1985-86 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard before death intervened early that same fall with a swift startling stroke. It's an old truth that writers, theorizing on the state of their form, tend to talk mainly about or to themselves.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEXT MILLENNIUM By Italo Calvino. LEAD: SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEXT MILLENNIUM By Italo Calvino.