LIGHTNESS!

About this event

Today we will discuss **the virtue of lightness** through the first of Italo Calvino’s *Six Memos for the Next Millennium*. Calvino’s *Six Memos* consists of five completed meditations—on lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity—offered as values worth carrying into the future age. They are reflections on literature, but also on perception, thought, creativity, and how we confront the world. In the first memo, **“Lightness,”** Calvino asks what it might mean to remove weight from our experience without becoming shallow or frivolous. He describes his own writing as an attempt to remove weight from people, cities, stories, and language itself. Against the weight, inertia, and opacity of the world, he proposes a thoughtful lightness: a different way of seeing and bearing reality. Is lightness the opposite of seriousness, or just a different way of carrying the real? His central image is the myth of **Perseus and Medusa**. Perseus cannot confront Medusa directly without being turned to stone. Instead, wearing winged sandals, he approaches her indirectly, looking at her reflection in his shield. For Calvino, Perseus does not deny the reality of the monster or escape into fantasy. He changes his relationship to what threatens to petrify him. From mythology Calvino moves through poetry, philosophy, science, and literature. Lucretius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Cavalcanti, Shakespeare, Leopardi, Kundera, atoms, computer science, and the dissolution of apparently solid matter all become ways of exploring his striking proposition that **“knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world.”** But is lightness always a virtue? In response to Calvino, Robert Pogue Harrison makes **the case for heaviness** in *Lightness and Heaviness in Art*. Perhaps gravity, burden, attachment, responsibility, mortality, and seriousness are not merely weights from which we should seek liberation. Perhaps some things acquire meaning precisely because they have…