Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), translated into English by British poet Patrick Creagh, is a collection of lectures Italian author Italo Calvino was about to deliver for the Charles Eliot Norton Lecture Series at Harvard University in 1985 at the time of his death. The lectures outline six values Calvino wished to preserve and promote for writers in the coming millennium: in practice, the essays serve as Calvino’s portrait of the ideal writer. “Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose…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 times…belongs to the realm of death.” Calvino died before he could complete the series, so the volume contains only five essays, on Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity. The sixth “Memo” was to have been on the subject of “Consistency.”

Calvino’s first memo is on the subject of “Lightness”; he opens with this topic because it is the one dearest to his heart. “Lightness” is several things to Calvino. First, it is a working method: “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.” Second, lightness is a worldview, a philosophical position, something like the pagan naturalism of Lucretius and Ovid. Third, it is a quality “arising from the writing itself,” completely independent of the writer’s philosophical position. Lastly—and most relevantly for the coming millennium—lightness is a way of thinking, a way of rising above the noise of life. Calvino considers the history of literature through the prism of “lightness,” arguing that “two opposite tendencies have competed in literature: one tries to make language into a weightless element that hovers above things like a cloud or better…. The other tries to give language the weight, density, and concreteness of things.” He celebrates as a peerless example of the former Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The second Memo concerns “Quickness.” Calvino stresses that he is not referring to narrative pace, which can be “delaying, cyclic, or motionless.” Rather, quickness is a species of lightness: “agility, mobility, and ease, all qualities that go with writing where it is natural to digress, to jump from one subject to another, to lose the thread a hundred times and find it again after a hundred more twists and turns.” Although Calvino is writing in the 1980s, prior to the rise of computer-based communications, he presciently argues that in the era of “fantastically speedy, widespread media,” speediness in literature will serve the vital purpose of “communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.”



The third memo, on Exactitude, begins appropriately with an exact definition: “To my mind, exactitude means three things above all: (1) a well-defined and well-calculated plan for the work in question; (2) an evocation of clear, incisive, memorable visual images; (3) a language as precise as possible both in choice of words and in expression of the subtleties of thought and imagination.

Calvino celebrates exactness of style, pointing out that even the most apparently ornate writers (such as Joyce and Nabokov) seek exact forms of expression. However, Calvino is more interested in the forms of exactness that characterize his own work: the use of logical, numerical, or geometrical systems to structure a work.

The memo on “Visibility” again discusses the threat of modern media: “If I have included visibility in my list of values to be saved, it is to give warning of the danger we run in losing a basic human faculty: the power of bringing visions into focus with our eyes shut, of bringing forth forms and colors from the lines of black letters on a white page, and in fact of thinking in terms of images.” Calvino worries that the imaginative faculty to create mental pictures is threatened by the growing prevalence of pre-packaged imagery.



In his memo on “Multiplicity,” Calvino sets out his case for the uniqueness of literature. In most fields, Calvino argues, excessive ambition is just that: excessive. In literature, however, excessive ambition is an essential part of the project: “Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.” For Calvino, this will require “Multiplicity” in the coming era because of science’s tendency to create “sectorial and specialized” knowledge. Multiplicity can represent our experience, but also reconcile its separateness into something whole.

Italo Calvino is widely recognized as one of Italy’s most important twentieth-century writers. As a volume of literary criticism (and self-criticism), Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a vital companion to his work.