lightness

from a collection of six essays by italo calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium . ostensibly about storytelling, but i think also about living and being. after lightness is quickness. i have let heaviness capture me; movement is hampered. i will study these essays, and take calvino's counsel.

"my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. 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 shall try to explain why i have come to consider lightness a value rather than a defect.

i hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know that there is a lightness of frivolity. in fact, thoughtul lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.

Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is in reality a bitter confirmation of the Ineluctable Weight of Living, not only in the situation of deperate 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 consist chefly 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 differnet from the one we live in.

whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, i think i should fly like Perseus into a different space. i don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. i mean that i have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a differnet logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification. the images of lightness that i seek should not fade away like dreams dissolved by the realities of present and future....."

i want to do this; to understand this. i cannot grasp it just yet. i have wasted too many years escaping into dreams and the irrational.