Six Memos

for the
Next Millennium
The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures
Italo Calvino

Six Memos
for the
Next Millennium

Vintage International
Vintage Books
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York
Contents

Commentary on Lightness 1
Lightness 4
Quickness 12
Exactitude 21

Visibility 37
Multiplicity 53
Commentary on Lightness

Italo Calvinos Six Memos for the Next Millennium contains

five memos, or personal testaments. The sixth was never
written on paper. Each memo on lightness, quickness,
exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity acts as a guideline for
life and creativity. Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a book
one should all read to endure a more satisfying life of clar-
ity and simplicity.
Although Calvinos book was primarily written in
regards to literature, his book can also relate to the fields of
art and design. As in writing, design and typography should
be light, clear, and simple while still maintaining a visually
appealing and comprehensive story. Essentially, a designer
and typographer convey to their audience a story that
must be visually read and understood. Typography, design
and writing portray messages, personalities, and hidden
meanings for their audience in different ways but also much
in the same vein.
Calvino describes a weightiness attached to writing in
his first chapter: Lightness. Calvino states that unless it is
avoided, weightiness will be present always. Therefore, the
writer, designer, or artist must seek out lightness, ridding
him of the unbearable weightiness that presents itself.
This task exists also in the world of typography and design
where one must avoid the natural weight of life. Calvino
takes us on a journey through his mind as we explore differ-
ent approaches to extinguish the weightiness from writing
and in life. No matter the approach, Calvino says the end
goal will always be the same: the sense of lightness.
Over the centuries, a desire for lightness, the ephemeral,
the feeling of floating and flying was created. In typography
and design, one hopes to create a world floating in space,
one that is cushioned and protected from the barriers of
the page. Simple, easily read and understood objects and
words existing on a plane of complete lightness as in a
dreamscape. In a sense, this is the way one wants to live
their lives. There is a constant struggle between weightiness
and lightness yet without one the other cannot solely exist.
Much like the Oriental philosophy of ying and yang.
7
 We strive for the side of lightness but again, the exis-
tence would vanquish if not for the other. The weighti-
ness gives us something to strive for in life, art, design and
writing.
Six Memos for the Next Millennium isnt just for the next mil-
lennium but for all millenniums to come. This book deals
with life and the problems one must overcome in order to
become a being of lightness. We desire a life full of light-
ness yet we are bombarded with a weightiness of a world
constantly moving and shifting. However, change is not the
problem, it is the need to stay focused and hold on to the
lightness, not to become overwhelmed by the weightiness of
constancy. Calvino is a messiah for the religion of light-
ness. Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a bible to maintain
a balance within this world of oneself and within the world
of design.
The ultimate goal is to portray a message in a way that is
most simple while still maintaining emotion, clarity, person-
ality, and above all a world of lightness. The best designs
are always the most simple and free of weightiness. Much
like writing, certain words evoke a feeling or imagery of
weight. As in typography and design, certain fonts and
objects do the same. We are left with a feeling of heaviness
or lightness. Calvino describes lightness as a subtraction of
weight rather than a pre-existing lightness. Therefore, one
must chisel away the weightiness to create the perfect light
sculpture. Calvino likens it to the stare of Medusa, which
turns us into stone stemming from our thoughts, the people
around us, and the cities we live in. For all these reasons,
Calvino stresses the need to seek the lightness in all so that
we can become free of weight and enjoy our living, our
writing, and our design to the fullest.
It is in our nature to overanalyze; yet this contributes to
the heaviness of the world. One must change the approach
when things seem too heavy; we must envision lightness in
us. We must become lightness. Six Memos for the Next Millen-
nium is a guidebook to life for all who feel the weight and
pressures of daily life. After reading Six Memos to the Next
Millennium, you will be closer to living a more fulfilling life
of lightness that Italo Calvino foresaw and also desired.

8
Lightness
Lecture One
I will devote my first lecture to the opposition between
lightness and weight, and will uphold the values of light-
ness. This does not mean that I consider the virtues of
weight any less compelling, but simply that I have more to
say about lightness.
After forty years of writing fiction, after exploring vari-
ous roads and making diverse experiments, the time has
come for me to look for an overall definition of my work.
I would suggest this: 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.
In this talk I shall try to explainboth to myself and to
youwhy I have come to consider lightness a value rather
than a defect; to indicate the works of the past in which I
recognize my ideal of lightness; and to show where I situate
this value in the present and how I project it into the future.

I will start with the last point. When I began my career,

the categorical imperative of every young writer was to
represent his own time. Full of good intentions, I tried to
identify myself with the ruthless energies propelling the
events of our century, both collective and individual. I tried
to find some harmony between the adventurous, picaresque
inner rhythm that prompted me to write and the frantic
spectacle of the world, sometimes dramatic and sometimes
grotesque. Soon I became aware that between the facts of
life that should have been my raw materials and the quick
light touch I wanted for my writing, there was a gulf that
cost me increasing effort to cross. Maybe I was only then
becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of
the worldqualities that stick to writing from the start, un-
less one finds some way of evading them.
At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turn-
ing into stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced
depending on people and places but one that spared no as-
11
pect of life. It was as if no one could escape the inexorable
stare of Medusa. The only hero able to cut off Medusas
head is Perseus, who flies with winged sandals; Perseus, who
does not turn his gaze upon the face of the Gorgon but
only upon her image reflected in his bronze shield. Thus
Perseus comes to my aid even at the moment, just as I too
am about to be caught in a vise of stonewhich happens
every time I try to speak about my own past. Better to let
my talk be composed of images from mythology.
To cut off Medusas head without being turned to stone,
Perseus supports himself on the very lightest of things, the
winds and the clouds, and fixes his gaze upon what can
be revealed only by indirect vision, an image caught in a
mirror. I am immediately tempted to see this myth as an
allegory on the poets relationship to the world, a lesson
in the method to follow when writing. But I know that any
interpretation impoverishes the myth and suffocates it. With
myths, one should not be in a hurry. It is better to let them
settle into the memory, to stop and dwell on every detail,
to reflect on them without losing touch with their language
of images. The lesson we can learn from a myth lies in the
literal narrative, not in what we add to it from the outside.
The relationship between Perseus and the Gorgon is a
complex one and does not end with the beheading of the
monster. Medusas blood gives birth to a winged horse,
Pegasusthe heaviness of stone is transformed into its
opposite. With one blow of his hoof on Mount Helicon,
Pegasus makes a spring gush forth, where the Muses drink.
In certain versions of the myth, it is Perseus who rides the
miraculous Pegasus, so dear to the Muses, born from the
accursed blood of Medusa. (Even the winged sandals, inci-
dentally, come from the world of monsters, for Perseus ob-
tained them from one of Medusas sisters, the Graiae, who
had one tooth and one eye among them.) As for the severed
head, Perseus does not abandon it but carries it concealed
in a bag. When his enemies are about to overcome him,
he has only to display it, holding it by its snaky locks, and
this bloodstained booty becomes an invincible weapon in
the heros hand. It is a weapon he uses only in cases of dire
necessity, and only against those who deserve the punish-
ment of being turned into statues. Here, certainly, the myth
is telling us something, something implicit in the images
that cant be explained in any other way. Perseus succeeds
in mastering that horrendous face by keeping it hidden,

12
just as in the first place he vanquished it by viewing it in a
mirror. Perseuss strength always lies in a refusal to look di-
rectly, but not in a refusal of the reality in which he is fated
to live; he carries the reality with him and accepts it as his
particular burden.
On the relationship between Perseus and Medusa, we
can learn something more from Ovids Metamorphoses. Per-
seus wins another battle: he hacks a sea-monster to pieces
with his sword and sets Andromeda free. Now he prepares
to do what any of us would do after such an awful chore
he wants to wash his hands. But another problem arises:
where to put Medusas head. And here Ovid has some lines
(IV.740-752) that seem to me extraordinary in showing how
much delicacy of spirit a man must have to be a Perseus,
the killer of monsters: So that the rough sand should not
harm the snake-haired head, he makes the ground soft
with a bed of leaves, and on top of that he strews little
branches of plants born under water, and on this he places
Medusas head, face down. I think that the lightness, of
which Perseus is the hero, could not be better represented
than by this gesture of refreshing courtesy toward a being
so monstrous and terrifying yet at the same time somehow
fragile and perishable. But the most unexpected thing is
the miracle that follows: when they touch Medusa, the little
marine plants turn to coral and the nymphs, in order to
have coral for adornments, rush to bring sprigs and sea-
weed to the terrible head.
This clash of images, in which the fine grace of the cor-
al touches the savage horror of the Gorgon, is so suggestive
that I would not like to spoil it by attempting glosses or in-
terpretations. What I can do is to compare Ovids lines with
those of a modern poet, Eugenio Montale, in his Piccolo
testamento, where we also find the subtlest of elements
they could stand as symbols of his poetry: mother-of-
pearl trace of a snail / or mica of crushed glassput up
against a fearful, hellish monster, a Lucifer with pitch-black
winges who descends upon the cities of the West. Never as
in this poem, written in 1953, did Montale evoke such an
apocalyptic vision, yet it is those minute, luminous tracings
that are placed in the foreground and set in contrast to dark
catastrophe Keep its ash in your compact / when every
lamp is out / and the sardana becomes infernal). But how
can we hope to save ourselves in that which is most fragile?
Montales poem is a profession of faith in the persistence

13
of what seems most fated to perish, in the moral values
invested in the most tenuous traces: the thin glimmer strik-
ing down there / wasnt that of a match.
In order to talk about our own times I have gone the
long way around, calling up Ovids fragile Medusa and
Montales black Lucifer. It is hard for a novelist to give
examples of his idea of lightness from the events of ev-
eryday life, without making them the unattainable object
of an endless qute. This is what Milan Kundera has done
with great clarity and immediacy. His novel The Unbear-
able 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 con-
strictions 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 sentencethe very qualities with which this novel is
written, and which belong to a world quite different from
the one we live in.
Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I
think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I dont
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 different logic and with fresh
methods of cognition and verification. The images of light-
ness that I seek should not fade away like dreams dissolved
by the realities of the present and future
In the boundless universe of literature there are always
new avenues to be explored, both very recent and very
ancient, styles and forms that can change our image of
the world . . . . . But if literature is not enough to assure
me that I am not just chasing dreams, I look to science to
nourish my visions in which all heaviness disappears. Today
every branch of science seems intent on demonstrating that
the world is supported by the most minute entities, such as
the messages of DNA, the impulses of neurons, and quarks,
and neutrinos wandering through space since the beginning
of time . . . . .
Then we have computer science. It is true that software

14
cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the
weight of hardware. But it is software that gives the orders,
acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only
as functions of the software and evolve so that they can
work out ever more complex programs. The second indus-
trial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with
such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but
with bits in a flow of information traveling along circuits
in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still
exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.
Is it legitimate to turn to scientific discourse to find an
image of the world that suits my view? If what I am at-
tempting here attracts me, it is because I feel it might con-
nect with a very old thread in the history of poetry.
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 per-
manent 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 the weight of matter
from crushing us. Even while laying down the rigorous me-
chanical 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 possibilitieseven the poetry of nothingness
issues from a poet who had no doubts whatever about the
physical reality of the world.
This atomizing of things extends also to the visible
aspects of the world, and it is here that Lucretius is at his
best as a poet: the little motes of dust swirling in a shaft of
sunlight in a dark room (II.114-124); the minuscule shells,
all similar but each one different, that waves gently cast up
on the bibula harena, the imbibing sand (II. 374-376); or
the spiderwebs that wrap themselves around us without our
noticing them as we walk along (III. 381-390).
I have already mentioned Ovids Metamorphoses, another
encyclopedic poem (written fifty years after Lucretius),
which has its starting point not in physical reality but in
the fables of mythology. For Ovid, too, everything can be

15
transformed into something else, and knowledge of the
world means dissolving the solidity of the world. And also
for him there is an essential parity between everything that
exists, as opposed to any sort of hierarchy of powers or
values. If the world of Lucretius is composed of immutable
atoms, Ovids world is made up of the qualities, attributes
and forms that define the variety of things, whether plants,
animals, or persons. But these are only the outwards ap-
pearances of a single common substance thatif stirred
by profound emotionmay be changed into what most
differs from it.
It is in following the continuity of the passage from one
form to another that Ovid displays his incomparable gifts.
He tells how a woman realizes that she is changing into a
lotus tree: her feet are rooted to the earth, a soft bark creeps
up little by little and enfolds her groin; she makes a move-
ment to tear her hair and finds her hands full of leaves.
Or he speaks of Arachnes fingers, expert at winding or
unraveling wool, turning the spindle, plying the needle in
embroidery, fingers that at a certain point we see lengthen-
ing into slender spiders legs and beginning to weave a web.
In both Lucretius and Ovid, lightness is a way of look-
ing at the world based on philosophy and science: the
doctrines of Epicurus and those of Pythagoras for Ovid (a
Pythagoras who, as presented by Ovid, greatly resembles
the Buddha). In both cases the lightness is also something
arising from the writing itself, from the poets own linguistic
power, quite independent of whatever philosophic doctrine
the poet claims to be following.

From what I have said so far, I think the concept of light-

ness is beginning to take shape. Above all I hope to have
shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thought-
fulness, just as we all know there is a lightness of frivolity.
In fact, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull
and heavy.
I could not illustrate this notion better than by using
a story from the Decameron (VI.9), in which the Floren-
tine poet Guido Cavalcanti appears. Boccaccio presents
Cavalcanti as an austere philosopher, walking meditatively
among marble tombs near a church. The jeunesse dore of
Florence is riding through the city in a group, on the way
from one party to another, always looking for a chance to
enlarge its round of invitations. Cavalcanti is not popular

16
with them because, although wealthy and elegant, he has
refused to join in their revelsand also because his mysteri-
ous philosophy is suspected of impiety.
One day, Guido left Orto San Michele and walked along
the Corso degli Admiari, which was often his route, as far
as San Giovanni. Great marble tombs, no in Santa Repa-
rata, were then scattered about San Giovanni. As he was
standing between the porphyry columns of the church and
these tombs, with the door of the church shut fast behind
him, Messer Betto and his company came riding along the
Piazza di Santa Reparata. Catching sight of Guido among
the tombs, they said, Lets go and pick a quarrel. Spur-
ring their horses, they came down upon him in a play, like a
charging squad, before he was aware of them. They began:
Guido, you refuse to be of our company; but look, when
you have proved that there is no God, what will you have
accomplished? Guido, seeing himself surrounded by them,
answered quickly, Gentlemen, you may say anything you
wish to me in your own home. Then, resting his hand on
one of the great tombs and being very nimble, he leaped
over it and, landing on the other side, made off and rid
himself of them.

What interests us here is not so much the spirited reply

attributed to Cavalcanti (which may be interpreted in the
light of the fact that the Epicuriansm claimed by the poet
was really Averroism, according to which the individual
soul is only a part of the universal intellect: the tombs are
your home and not mine insofar as the individual bodily
death is overcome by anyone who rises to universal contem-
plation through intellectual speculation). What strikes me
most is the visual scene evoked by Boccaccio, of Cavalcanti
freeing himself with a liap s come colui che leggerissimo
era, a man very light in body.
Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new mil-
lennium, 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 timesnoisy, aggressive, revving and roar-
ingbelongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for
rusty old cars.
I would like you to bear this image in mind as I proceed
to talk about Cavalcaanti as the poet of lightness. The

17
dramatis personae of his poems are not so much human
beings as sighs, rays of light, optical images, and above all
those nonmaterial impulses and messages he calls spirits.
A theme by no means light, such as the sufferings of love,
is dissolved into impalpable entities that move between
sensitive soul and intellective soul, between heart and mind,
between eyes and voice. In short, in every case we are
concerned with something marked by three characteristics:
(1) it is to the highest degree light; (2) it is in motion; (3) it
is a vector of information. In some poems this messenger-
cum-message is the poetic text itself. In the most famous
onePer chi no spero di tornai giammai (Because I
never hope to return)the exiled poet addresses the ballad
he is writing and says: Va tu, leggera e piana, / dritt a
la donna mia (Go, light and soft, / straight to my lady).
In another poem it is the tools of the writers tradequills
and the knives to sharpen themthat have their say: Noi
sin le triste penne isbigottite / le cesoiuzze el coltellin
dolente (We are the poor, bewildered quills, / The little
scissors and the grieving penknife). In sonnet 13 the word
spirito or spiritello appears in every line. In what is
plainly a self-parody, Cavalcanti takes his predilection for
that key word to its ultimate conclusion, concentrating a
complicated abstract narrative involving fourteen spirits,
each with a different function, and all within the scope of
fourteen lines. In another sonnet the body is dismembered
by the sufferings of love, but goes on walking about like an
automation fatto di rame o di pietra o di legno (made
of copper or stone or wood). Years before Guinizelli in
one of his sonnets had transformed his poet into a brass
statue, a concrete image that draws its strength from the
very sense of weight it communicates. In Cavalcanti the
weight of matter is dissolved because the materials of the
human simulacrum can be many, all interchangeable. The
metaphor does not impress a solid image on us, and not
even the word pietra (stone) lends heaviness to the line. Here
also we find the equality of all existing things that I spoke
of in regard to Lucretius and Ovid. The critic Gianfranco
Contini defines it as the parificazione cavalcantiana dei
reali, referring to Cavalcantis way of putting everything
on the same level.
The most felicitous example of Cavalcantis leveling of
things we find in a sonnet that begins with a list of images
of beauty, all destined to be surpassed by the beauty of the

18
beloved woman:

Beauty of woman and wise of hearts, and gentle knights in

armor; the song of birds and the discourse of love; bright
ships moving swiftly on the sea; clear air when the dawn
appears, and white snow falling without wind; stream of
water and meadow with every flower; gold, silver, azure in
ornaments.

The line e bianca neve scender senza venti is taken up

with a few modifications by Dante in Inferno XIV.30: Come
di neve in alpe sanza vento (As snow falls in the mountains
without wind). The two lines are almost identical, but they
express two completely different concepts. In both the snow
on windless days suggests a light, silent movement. But here
the resemblance ends. In Dante the line is dominated by
the specification of the place (in alpe), which gives us a
mountainous landscape, whereas in Cavalcanti the adjective
bianca, which may seem pleonastic, together with the
verb fallalso completely predictabledissolve the land-
scape into an atmosphere of suspended abstraction. But it is
chiefly the first word that determines the difference between
the two lines. In Cavalcanti the conjunction e (and) puts the
snow on the same level as the other visions that precede and
follow it: a series of images like a catalogue of the beau-
ties of the world. In Dante the adverb come (as) encloses
the entire scene in the frame of a metaphor, but within this
frame it has a concrete reality of its own. No less concrete
and dramatic is the landscape of hell under a rain of fire,
which he illustrates by the simile of the snow. In Cavalcanti
everything moves so swiftly that we are unaware of its
consistency, on of its effects. In Dante everything acquires
consistency and stability: the weight of things is precisely
established. Even when he is speaking of light things, Dante
seems to want to render the exact weight of this lightness:
come di neve in alpe sanza vento. In another very similar
line the weight of a body sinking into the water and disap-
pearing is, as it were, held back and slowed down: Come
per acqua cupa cosa grave (Like some heavy thing in deep
water; Paradiso III.123).
At this point we should remember that the idea of the
world as composed of weightless atoms is striking just
because we know the weight of things so well. So, too, we
would be unable to appreciate the lightness of language to it.

19