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

poetico, che in gran parte e tutt'uno colla rapidita, non e piacevole per altro che per questi effetti, e non consiste in altro. L'ecci-tamento d'idee simultanee, puo derivare e da ciascuna pa-rola isolata, o propria o metaforica, e dalla loro colloca-zione, e dal giro della frase, e dalla soppressione stessa di altre parole o frasi ec. (3 Novembre 1821).
    Speed and conciseness of style please us because they present the mind with a rush of ideas that are simultaneous, or that follow each other so quickly they seem simultaneous, and set the mind afloat on such an abundance of thoughts or images or spiritual feelings that either it cannot embrace them all, each one fully, or it has no time to be idle and empty of feelings. The power of poetic style, which is largely the same thing as rapidity, is pleasing for these effects alone and consists in nothing else. The excitement of simultaneous ideas may arise either from each isolated word, whether literal or metaphorical, from their arrangement, from the turn of a phrase, or even from the suppression of other words and phrases.
    The metaphor of the horse for the speed of thought was, I think, first used by Galileo Galilei. In the
Saggiatore
(The Tester), arguing with an adversary who propped up his own theories with a vast number of classical quotations, he wrote:
    Se il discorrere circa un problema difficile fosse come il portar pesi, dove molti cavalli porteranno piu sacca di grano che un caval solo, io acconsentirei che i molti discorsi facesser piu che un solo; ma il discorrere e come il correre, e non come il portare, ed un caval barbero solo correra piu che cento frisoni. (45)
    If discoursing on a difficult problem were like carrying weights, when many horses can carry more sacks of grain than a single horse, I would agree that many discourses would do more than a single one; but discoursing is like coursing, not like carrying, and one Barbary courser can go faster than a hundred Frieslands.
    “Discoursing,” or “discourse,” for Galileo means reasoning, and very often deductive reasoning. “Discoursing is like coursing”: this statement could be Galileo's declaration of faith—style as a method of thought and as literary taste. For him, good thinking means quickness, agility in reasoning, economy in argument, but also the use of imaginative examples.
    There is also a certain predilection for the horse in Galileo's metaphors and
Gedanken-Experimenten.
In a study I once made on metaphor in Galileo, I counted at least eleven significant examples in which he talks of horses—as an image of motion, and therefore as an instrument in kinetic experiments; as a form of nature in all its complexity and also in all its beauty; as a form that sparks off the imagination in the hypothetical situation of horses subjected to the most unlikely trials or growing to gigantic proportions—and all this apart from the comparison of reasoning with racing: “Discoursing is like coursing.”
    In the
Dialogo dei massimi sistemi
(Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems), speed of thought is personified by Sa-gredo, a character who intervenes in the discussion between the Ptolomaic Simplicio and the Copernican Salviati. Salviati and Sa-gredo represent two different facets of Galileo's temperament. Salviati is the rigorously methodical reasoner, who proceeds slowly and with prudence; Sagredo, with his “swift manner of speech” and more imaginative way of seeing things, draws conclusions that have not been demonstrated and pushes every ideato its extreme consequences. It is Sagredo who makes hypotheses on how life might be on the moon or what would happen if the earth stopped turning. But it is Salviati who defines the scale of values in which Galileo places quickness of mind. Instantaneous reasoning without
passaggi
(transitions) is the reasoning of God's mind, infinitely superior to the mind of man, which however should not be despised or considered nothing, insofar as it was