The moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. Perhaps the most poignant of his lectures, both in the context of CalvinoвЂ™s own fate in the hands of timeвЂ™s merciless gallop and in his prescience about todayвЂ™s age of compulsive speediness that he never lived to see, is the second one, titled вЂњQuickness.вЂќД¬alvino begins by considering objects and the storytelling mesmerism that they hold, as in real life, in fiction: He had spent his final months laboring over them but had completed only five of the six, eventually published as Six Memos for the Next Millennium ( public library | IndieBound). But as he contemplated this grand cultural precipice, he himself ran out of time.Д¬alvino - a sage of writing and a man of enduring insight into such subtleties of existence as distraction and procrastination, the art of asserting oneself with grace, and the meaning of life - died shortly before he was scheduled to depart for Harvard to deliver the lectures.

Cummings, Jorge Luis Borges, Leonard Bernstein, and John Cage - he hurried to commit to paper the six lectures he would deliver over the course of the term, exploring вЂњthe millennium of the bookвЂќ that was about to end and peering forward into what the future might hold for вЂњthe expressive, cognitive, and imaginative possibilitiesвЂќ of writing.

When Italo Calvino was offered the 1985вЂ“1986 term of the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry - HarvardвЂ™s annual lectureship held by such luminaries as T.S.

Italo calvino six memos