Calvino's lyrical essays move in so many directions, with such intellectual acuity, that they are often hard to keep up with. But the literature of quickness, just as all of Calvino’s other qualities, exist on a. Italo Calvino, Quickness, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1988, pp.
It has purpose and direction it takes the shortest route to its destination. Quickness is swift and agile, motivated and elegant.
Praising literary design that features clear, sharp images and precisely chosen words, he warns that an image-saturated world in the future could inhibit inner vision. For Italo Calvino, the horse is the emblem for literary quickness. He asserts his fondness for concise short-form writing that concentrates the imagination. "Literature can survive only by pursuing outsized goals, even those beyond all hope of achievement," Calvino declares. As Calvino's chosen title for the collection indicates, he planned to write a final essay on consistency but never did. The essays explore, respectively, the themes of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. Calvino considers literary values that he sought in his own writing and ideas he wanted to convey to 21st-century writers. These five erudite essays, originally intended for the Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures at Harvard, compose his final work. When Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler) died unexpectedly in 1985, he was an internationally known storyteller and arguably Italy's most celebrated author. “A key to Calvino’s own work and a thoroughly delightful and illuminating commentary on some of the world’s greatest writing.”- San Francisco Chronicle “One of the most rigorously presented and beautifully illustrated critical testaments in all of literature.”- Boston Globe Written in the mid-1980s, these lectures have proven to be astonishingly prescient as we have entered Calvino’s “next millennium”. He devotes one “memo” each to the concepts of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, drawing examples from his vast knowledge of myth, folklore, and works both ancient and modern. Six Memos for the Next Millennium collects the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature, but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. The six planned lectures would define the qualities he most valued in writing, and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. The celebrated author of Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities shares his “brilliant, original approach to literature” in these late-career lectures ( San Francisco Chronicle).Īt the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on his Charles Eliot Norton poetry lectures to be delivered the following year at Harvard University.
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