#sarah rule
Calvino and lightness
Italo Calvino has a wonderful essay, “Lightness,” in which he honors lightness as an aesthetic choice and a difficulty, rather than as something to be easily dismissed. You cannot, after all, get something airborne on a mere whim…
A suspicion that lightness is not deeply serious (but instead whimsical) pervades aesthetic discourse. But what if lightness is a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper the intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor? Lightness is then a philosophical victory over heaviness.
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