If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fatal, inescapable points, then digressions lengthen that line-and if these digressions become so complex, tangled, tortuous, and so rapid as to obscure their own tracks, then perhaps death won’t find us again, perhaps time will lose its way, perhaps we’ll be able to remain concealed in our ever-changing hiding places. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. Any means, any weapon, can be used to save oneself from death and time.
Tristram Shandy doesn’t want to be born because he doesn’t want to die. Death is hidden in clocks, as Belli said, along with the unhappiness of individual life, of this fragment, of this thing that is divided, disintegrated, deprived of wholeness-death, which is time, the time of individuation, of separation, the abstract time that rolls toward its end. He wrote 5 memos (lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, and the last one, on consistency, was never written). Italo Calvino, one of the worlds best storytellers, died on the eve of his departure for Harvard, where he was to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. The lectures never happened, but the book on the Memos was released. “The clock is Shandy’s first symbol: under its influence, he is conceived and his misfortunes begin, which are the same thing according to this sign of time. Italo Calvino wrote five lectures with Memos for the next Millennium before he passed away in 1985.