Lightness

image by AI; my own prompt I am reading Italo Calvino’s last and unfinished work Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Or, I should probably say, I am half-heartedly trying to read it, since it is all over the place, and packed with references to literature some of which was written millennia ago, some of it in dead languages, that I find utterly unfathomable. Still, he’s a good writer, in the sense that he has interesting ideas and keeps things moving along, so I persevere. The book is a collection of six lectures for Harvard University written in 1985 to outline the six qualities of writing that he wished to urge writers to accommodate in their work to make it more relevant and useful for readers in the 21st century. The subject of the first of these lectures is lightness. By this Italo did not mean that writing should be fluffy or light-hearted, but rather that it not be ponderous, buried under its own weight. He wanted writing and literature to provide relief from the often…