It Is Not True What Everyone Always Says
that the only way to see America is to go across it by car. Apart from the fact that it is impossible given its enormous size, it is also deadly boring. A few outings on the motorway are enough to give an idea of what small-town and even village America is like on average, with the endless suburbs along the highways, a sigh of desperate squalor, with all those low buildings, petrol stations or other shops which look like them, and the colours of the writing on the shops signs, and you realize that 95 per cent of America is a country of ugliness, oppressiveness and sameness, in short of relentless monotony. Then you go across even deserted areas for hours and hours, like those we crossed amid the forests and coasts of California, certainly among the most beautiful places in the world, but even there you feel a certain lack of interest, perhaps because of that absence of human dimensions. But the most boring thing about travelling by car is spending the evening in one of those tiny anonymous towns where there is absolutely nothing to do except to have it confirmed that the ennui of a small American town is exactly how it has always been described, or even worse. America keeps its promises: there is the bar with its wall adorned with hunting-trophies of deer and reindeer; in the public bar there are farmers with cowboy hats playing cards, a fat prostitute seducing a salesman, a drunk trying to start a fight. This squalor is not just to be found in the small anonymous towns but also, in a slightly more alluring form, in famous holiday centres like Monterey and Carmel; and there too in this dead season it is very difficult to find a restaurant that will serve dinner. (87-88)

Adventure of an Italian
In order to familiarize himself with the big city, the Italian newcomer spent the evenings going too one party after another, following people he did not know into houses owned by people he knew even less. Thanks to a very witty and intelligent actress, he ends up in the house of a beautiful singer from television, amid a rather commercial crowd of theatre people, impresarios, etc. He meets a young fellow-Italian who is an airplane steward who spends half his week in Rome, the other half in NY. When the Italian newcomer is about to take the actress back to her home, the steward suggests they form a foursome, and persuades the actress to invite along a rather pretty girl who is a cinema actress. The girl quickly agrees, the two Italians are already rubbing their hands as if everything was signed and sealed, and all they had to do was to decided on who takes which girl. But in the actress’s house the conversation turns to culture and progressive politics. By this stage it is clear that there will be no action. The girls are anything but stupid, even the Hollywood actress who at first seemed the usual starlet. It turns out that both are Russian and both Jewish. In the end the two Italians leave and the Hollywood actress stays to sleep with her friend. It turns out that they are both lesbians. The two Italians go out into the deserted, drizzling streets of New York at 5 in the morning. (pp29)

Do you think writers should be involved in politics? And how should they do so? To what political tendency do you belong?
I believe that all men should be involved in politics. And writers too, inasmuch as they are men. I believe that our civic and moral conscience should influence the man first and then the writer. It is a long road, but there is no other. And I believe that the writer must keep open a discourse which in its implications cannot but be political as well. I have remained faithful to these principles, and in the nearly twelve years of my membership of the Community Part, my conscience as a Communist and my conscience as a writer have not entered into those agonizing conflicts which have tormented many of my friends, making them believe that it was necessary to opt for either one conscience or the other. Everything that forces us to give up a part of ourselves is negative. I participate in politics and literature in different ways, according to my abilities, but both things interest me as forming one and the same discourse about humanity.
- Questionnaire, 1956 (pp12-13)

-Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris: autobiographical writings

So what had the cinema meant to me in this context? I suppose: distance. It satisfied a need for distance, for an expansion of the boundaries of the real, for seeing immeasurable dimensions open up all around me, abstract as geometric entities, yet concrete too, crammed full of faces and situations and settings, which established an (abstract) network of relationships with the world of direct experience.
Since the war, cinema has been seen, discussed, made, in a completely different way. ... We no longer have one world within the brightly lit screen in the darkened theatre, and another heterogeneous world outside, the two being divided by a clean break, an ocean or abyss. The darkened theatre disappears, the screen becomes a magnifying glass placed on the routine world outside, forcing us to focus our attention on what the naked eye tends to skim over without settling on. This function has -- can have -- its usefulness, marginal, more substantial or occasionally very considerable. But it does not satisfy that anthropological and social need for distance.
- Italo Calvino, "A Cinema-Goer's Autobiography" pp. 60-61, The Road to San Giovanni.

...and it's pointless my trying to kindle a halo of feeling behind it with these words of commentary: all remains as it was then, those baskets were already dead then and I knew it, ghosts of a concreteness that had already disappeared, and I was already what I am, a citizen of cities and of history -- still without either city or history and suffering for it -- a consumer-- and victim - -of industrial products -- a candidate for consumerism, a freshly designated victim -- and already the lots were cast, all the lots, our own and everybody else's, yet what was this morning fury of my childhood, the fury that still persists in these not entirely sincere pages? Could everything perhaps have been different-- not very different but just enough to make the difference...? Might everything that is happening now perhaps have taken a different slant, in the world, in the history of civilization -- the losses not have been so absolute, the gains so uncertain?

- Italo Calvino, "The Road to San Giovanni" pp. 29-30, The Road to San Giovanni.

on pure image

French cinema was as heavy with smells as American films were light with Palmolive, polish and antiseptic. The women had a carnal presence that established them in the film-goer's mind as at once living women and erotic fantasies (Viviane Romance is the actress I'm thinking of here), while the eroticism of the Hollywood stars was sublimated, stylized, idealized. (Even the most carnal of the American actresses of the time, the platinum-blond Jean Harlow, was made unreal by the dazzling whiteness of her skin. In black-and-white the power of the white transfigured female faces, legs, shoulders and necks, making of Marlene Dietrich not so much an immediate object of desire but desire itself, seen as some extraterrestrial essence.) I sensed that French cinema was talking about things that were more disturbing and somehow forbidden....

- Italo Calvino, "A Cinema-Goer's Autobiography" pp. 49-50, The Road to San Giovanni.

on being many things

The artist's imagination is a world of potentialities that no work will succeed in realizing. What we experience by living is another world, answering to other forms of order and disorder. The layers of words that accumulate on the page, like the layers of colors on the canvas, are yet another world, also infinite but more easily controlled, less refractory to formulation. The link between the three worlds is the indefinable spoken of by Balzac: or, rather, I would call it the undecidable, the paradox of an infinite whole that contains other infinite wholes.

- Italo Calvino, "Visibility" pp. 97, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Medieval literature tended to produce works expressing the sum of human knowledge in an order and form of stable compactness, as in the Commedia, where a multiform richness of language converges with the application of systematic and unitary mode of thought. In contrast, the modern books that we love most are the outcome of a confluence and clash of a multiplicity of interpretative methods, modes of thought, and styles of expression. Even if the overall design has been minutely planned, what matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it-- a plurality of languages as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial.

- Italo Calvino, "Multiplicity" pp. 116-117, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Someone might object that the more the work tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from that unicum which is the self of the writer, his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.
But perhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart is something else: Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only too enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic....

- Italo Calvino, "Multiplicity" pp. 124, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

on being vague

For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience. Man therefore projects his desire into infinity and feels pleasure only when he is able to imagine that this pleasure has no end. But sind the human mind cannot conceive the infinite, and in fact falls back aghast at the very idea of it, it has to make do with what is indefinite, with sensations as they mingle together and create an impression of infinite space, illusory but pleasurable all the same....

- Italo Calvino, pp. 63, "Exactitude," Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

on resuscitating words

"...Literature-- and I mean literature that matches up to these requirements-- is the Promised Land in which language becomes what it really ought to be.
It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty-- that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.
At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of this epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of the mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language.
[57]... it is not just language that seems to have been struck by this pestilence. Consider visual images, for example. We live in an unending rainfall of images. The most powerful media transform the world into images and multiply it by means of the phantasmagoric play of mirrors. These are images stripped of the inner inevitability that ought to mark every image as form and as meaning, as a claim on the attention and as a source of possible meanings. Much of this cloud of visual images fades at once, like the dreams that leave no trace in the memory, but what does not fade is a feeling of alienation and discomfort.
But maybe this lack of substance is not to be found in images or in language alone, but in the world itself. This plague strikes also at the lives of people and the history of nations. It makes all histories formless, random, confused, with neither beginning nor end."

- Italo Calvino, pp. 56-57, "Exactitude," Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

on choosing to be [ ]

It is hard for a novelist to give examples of his idea of lightness from the events of everyday life, without making them the unattainable object of an endless quete. This is what Milan Kundera has done with great clarity and immediacy. His novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is in reality a bitter confirmation of the Ineluctable Weight of Living, not only in the situation of desperate and all-pervading oppression that has been the fate of his hapless country, but in a human condition common to us all, however infinitely more fortunate we may be. For Kundera the weight of living consists chiefly in constriction, in the dense net of public and private constrictions that enfolds us more and more closely. His novel shows us how everything we choose and value in life for its lightness soon reveals its true, unbearable weight. Perhaps only the liveliness and mobility of the intelligence escape this sentence-- the very qualities with which this novel is written, and which belong to a world quite different from the one we live in.
-- pp. 7, "Lightness."

The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius is the first great work of poetry in which knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world, leading to a perception of all that is infinitely minute, light, and mobile. Lucretius set out to write the poem of physical matter, but he warns us at the outset that this matter is made up of invisible particles. He is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies. Lucretius' chief concern is to prevent [9] the weight of matter from crushing us. Even while laying down the rigorous mechanical laws that determine every event, he feels the need to allow atoms to make unpredictable deviations from the straight line, thereby ensuring freedom both to atoms and to human beings. The poetry of the invisible, of infinite unexpected possibilities-- even the poetry of nothingness-- issues from a poet who had no doubts whatever about the physical reality of the world.
...For Ovid, too, everything can be transformed into something else, and knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.

- Italo Calvino, pp. 8-9, "Lightness," Six Memos for the Next Millennium.