LIGHTNESS!

Today we will discuss the virtue of lightness through the first of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Calvino’s Six Memos consists of five completed meditations—on lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity—offered as values worth carrying into the future age.
They are reflections on literature, but also on perception, thought, creativity, and how we confront the world.

In the first memo, “Lightness,” Calvino asks what it might mean to remove weight from our experience without becoming shallow or frivolous. He describes his own writing as an attempt to remove weight from people, cities, stories, and language itself. Against the weight, inertia, and opacity of the world, he proposes a thoughtful lightness: a different way of seeing and bearing reality.

Is lightness the opposite of seriousness, or just a different way of carrying the real?

His central image is the myth of Perseus and Medusa. Perseus cannot confront Medusa directly without being turned to stone. Instead, wearing winged sandals, he approaches her indirectly, looking at her reflection in his shield. For Calvino, Perseus does not deny the reality of the monster or escape into fantasy. He changes his relationship to what threatens to petrify him.

From mythology Calvino moves through poetry, philosophy, science, and literature. Lucretius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Cavalcanti, Shakespeare, Leopardi, Kundera, atoms, computer science, and the dissolution of apparently solid matter all become ways of exploring his striking proposition that “knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world.”

But is lightness always a virtue?

In response to Calvino, Robert Pogue Harrison makes the case for heaviness in Lightness and Heaviness in Art. Perhaps gravity, burden, attachment, responsibility, mortality, and seriousness are not merely weights from which we should seek liberation. Perhaps some things acquire meaning precisely because they have weight.

So our discussion will revolve around a philosophical tension:
How can we live lightly without living superficially?

Is lightness a form of wisdom—a capacity to resist being petrified by the gravity of existence? Or are there burdens that should not be made light? Can knowledge genuinely make the world less solid, fixed, and oppressive? And is Calvino ultimately proposing an escape from heaviness—or a better way of carrying it?

Please read and join us for a lively conversation inspired by this refreshing little gem.

Required Reading & Listening:

Italo Calvino, “Lightness,” from Six Memos for the Next Millennium**
Read the complete first memo, “Lightness.” (~27 pages)

Here: link or another version here
Audiobook https://youtu.be/SKAFE1vQB7U?is=v_ulnbcW8OvEp5Oq

Robert Pogue Harrison, “Lightness and Heaviness in Art”
A response to Calvino and a provocative defense of the value of heaviness.
Listen to Robert Harrison — Lightness and Heaviness in Art