Scan barcode
A review by bibliocyclist
Numbers in the Dark: And Other Stories by Italo Calvino
3.0
Do you find that you can say more in writing than you ever could in speaking, yet still never enough? Do you detect an empty chasm between yourself and others? Do you suspect that the more you know the closer you come to understanding nothing? If so, check out Numbers in the Dark, a diverse and diverting collection of short stories written by Italo Calvino between 1943 and 1984. Immerse yourself in Calvino’s strange and familiar worlds to meet the “wind man, who needs suddenly to shout and bite the air when he’s speaking,” interview the Neanderthal who has everything one could ever want and has done everything one could ever do, and consider that all the author’s words and deeds and yours and ours and “everything space and time contains is no more than that little that was generated from nothingness, the little that is that might very well not be, or be even smaller.”
***
Yet, even now, every time (often) that I find I don’t understand something, then, instinctively, I’m filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp that other knowledge, found and lost in an instant.
However hard I tried to put words between myself and the world, I couldn’t find any that were suitable to clothe things anew.
I’m like that, a wind man, who needs friction and headway when he’s walking, needs suddenly to shout and bite the air when he’s speaking. When the wind lifts in town, spreading from suburb to suburb in tongues of colourless flame, the town opens up before me like a book, it’s as though I could recognize everybody I see, I feel like yelling, “Hey there!” to the girls, the cyclists, like shouting out what I’m thinking, waving my hands.
I can’t tell you any stories because I’ve got this gap. There’s an empty chasm between me and everybody else. I wave my arms about inside it but I can’t get a hold of anything, I shout into it but no one hears: it’s total emptiness.
I’ll never manage to say anything, speaking. That’s why I write.
The head commands so long as it’s attached to the neck.
I make a sign for her to shush and point down with my hand in the air as though to warn her that the spell could break any second, then I make a circular gesture as if to say it’s all the same, and what I mean is that through me a black Pluto is reaching up from the underworld to carry her off, through her, a blazing Persephone, because that’s how the ruthless devourer of living substances, the Earth, starts her cycle over again.
I don’t know what you think you have that I don’t have, I had everything I wanted, everything that was done afterwards, I’d already done, everything that was said and thought and meant was already there in what I said and thought and meant, all complication of complication was already there, I only have to pick up this stone with my thumb and the other four fingers that fold over it, and everything’s already there.
Day rolls towards sunset. Summer rots in muddy autumn. Thus every day, every summer.
In some unidentifiable point of circuitry my call has lost its way.
Everything space and time contains is no more than that little that was generated from nothingness, the little that is that might very well not be, or be even smaller.
***
Yet, even now, every time (often) that I find I don’t understand something, then, instinctively, I’m filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp that other knowledge, found and lost in an instant.
However hard I tried to put words between myself and the world, I couldn’t find any that were suitable to clothe things anew.
I’m like that, a wind man, who needs friction and headway when he’s walking, needs suddenly to shout and bite the air when he’s speaking. When the wind lifts in town, spreading from suburb to suburb in tongues of colourless flame, the town opens up before me like a book, it’s as though I could recognize everybody I see, I feel like yelling, “Hey there!” to the girls, the cyclists, like shouting out what I’m thinking, waving my hands.
I can’t tell you any stories because I’ve got this gap. There’s an empty chasm between me and everybody else. I wave my arms about inside it but I can’t get a hold of anything, I shout into it but no one hears: it’s total emptiness.
I’ll never manage to say anything, speaking. That’s why I write.
The head commands so long as it’s attached to the neck.
I make a sign for her to shush and point down with my hand in the air as though to warn her that the spell could break any second, then I make a circular gesture as if to say it’s all the same, and what I mean is that through me a black Pluto is reaching up from the underworld to carry her off, through her, a blazing Persephone, because that’s how the ruthless devourer of living substances, the Earth, starts her cycle over again.
I don’t know what you think you have that I don’t have, I had everything I wanted, everything that was done afterwards, I’d already done, everything that was said and thought and meant was already there in what I said and thought and meant, all complication of complication was already there, I only have to pick up this stone with my thumb and the other four fingers that fold over it, and everything’s already there.
Day rolls towards sunset. Summer rots in muddy autumn. Thus every day, every summer.
In some unidentifiable point of circuitry my call has lost its way.
Everything space and time contains is no more than that little that was generated from nothingness, the little that is that might very well not be, or be even smaller.