Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium
A favourite writer of mine is Italo Calvino. His *Invisible Cities* is a masterpiece of imagined futures, short prose gems in which Marco Polo and Genghis Khan tell stories of cities where the truth of how we live is build into the architecture of these ephemeral places.
Suffice to say it is firmly rooted on the top shelf of my personal Great Work library.
Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures in 1985, and was in the process of writing these when he untimely died.
The five lectures are published in *Six Memos for the Next Millennium*, each one with a theme (the sixth “memo” was themed but never written). Calvino’s chapters are erudite, literary and elegant … a daunting standard for me trying to follow in his footsteps.
However, I’m using his themes over the coming weeks as a springboard into what it might take for Great Work to flourish in this world of ours.
Every Monday I’ll address one of these themes in the same order Calvino did. We’ll be looking at:
1. Lightness (Monday Dec 1st)
2. Quickness (Monday Dec 8th)
3. Exactitude (Monday Dec 15th)
4. Visibility (Monday Dec 22nd)
5. Multiplicity (Monday Dec 29th)
6. Consistency (Monday Jan 5th)
I love that book and I found it because of you and your Great Work is helping me get working again so THANK YOU MR. MBS. And can’t wait to read these gems.