Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino Read Free Book Online Page A

characters or to the events. In other words, even correctness of style is a question of quick adjustment, of agility of both thought and expression.
    The horse as an emblem of speed, even speed of the mind, runs through the whole history of literature, heralding the entire problematics of our own technological viewpoint. The age ofspeed, in transport as in information, opens with one of the finest essays in English literature, Thomas De Quincey's “The English Mail-Coach.” In 1849 he already understood everything we now know about the motorized highway world, including death-dealing high-speed crashes.
    In the section called “The Vision of Sudden Death,” De Quin-cey describes a night journey on the box of an express mail coach with a gigantic coachman who is fast asleep. The technical perfection of the vehicle, and the transformation of the driver into a blind inanimate object, puts the traveler at the mercy of the mechanical inexorability of a machine. In the clarity of perception brought on by a dose of laudanum, De Quincey becomes aware that the horses are running uncontrollably at thirteen miles an hour on the wrong side of the road. This means certain disaster, not for the swift, sturdy mail coach but for the first unfortunate carriage to come along that road in the opposite direction. In fact, at the end of the straight, tree-lined avenue, which looks like a “Gothic aisle,” he sees a “frail reedy gig” in which a young couple are approaching at one mile an hour. “Between them and eternity, to all human calculation, there is but a minute and a-half.” De Quincey gives a shout: “Mine had been the first step; the second was for the young man; the third was for God.” The account of these few seconds has not been bettered even in an age in which the experience of high speeds has become a basic fact of life.
    Glance of eye, thought of man, wing of angel, which of these had speed enough to sweep between the question and the answer, and divide the one from the other? Light does not tread upon the steps of light more indivisibly than did our all-conquering arrival upon the escaping efforts of the gig.
    De Quincey succeeds in conveying a sense of an extremely short period of time that nonetheless contains both the calculation of the technical inevitability of the crash and the imponderable— God's part in the matter—in virtue of which the two vehicles do not collide.
    The motif that interests us here is not physical speed, but the relationship between physical speed and speed of mind. This was also interesting to a great Italian poet of De Quincey's generation. Giacomo Leopardi, whose youth was as sedentary as one can imagine, struck a rare joyful moment when he wrote in his diary, the
Zibaldone di pensieri
(Casual Thoughts):
    La velocita, per esempio, de' cavalli o veduta, o sperimen-tata, cioe quando essi vi trasportano … e piacevolissima per se sola, cioe per la vivacita, Penergia, la forza, la vita di tal sensazione. Essa desta realmente una quasi idea delP infinito, sublima Panima, la fortifica … (27 Ottobre 1821).
    Speed, for example, of horses, whether seen or experienced, that is, when they are carrying you … is most pleasurable in itself; that is, for the vivacity, the energy, the strength, the sheer life of such a feeling. Indeed it almost gives you an idea of the infinite—elevates the soul, fortifies it.
    In his notes in the
Zibaldone
over the following few months, Leopardi develops his reflections on the subject of speed, and at a certain point starts to speak about literary style:
    La rapidità e la concisione dello stile, piace perche presenta all'anima una folia d'idee simultanee, o cosi rapidamente succedentisi, che paiono simultanee, e fanno ondeggiar Panima in una tale abbondanza di pensieri, o d'immagini e sensazioni spirituali, ch'ella o non e capace di abbracciarletutte, e pienamente ciascuna, o non ha tempo di restare in ozio, e priva di sensazioni. La forza dello stile