The Written World and the Unwritten World

I belong to that portion of humanity—a minority on the planetary scale but a majority I think among my public—that spends a large part of its waking hours in a special world, a world made up of horizontal lines where the words follow one another one at a time, where every sentence and every paragraph occupies its set place: a world that can be very rich, maybe even richer than the nonwritten one, but that requires me to make a special adjustment to situate myself in it. When I leave the written world to find my place in the other, in what we usually call the world, made up of three dimensions and five senses, populated by billions of our kind, that to me is equivalent every time to repeating the trauma of birth, giving the shape of intelligible reality to a set of confused sensations, and choosing a strategy for confronting the unexpected without being destroyed.

This new birth is always accompanied by special rites that signify the entrance into a different life: for example, the rite of putting on my glasses, since I’m nearsighted and read without glasses, while for the farsighted majority the opposite rite is imposed, that is, of taking off the glasses used for reading.

Every rite of passage corresponds to a change in mental attitude. When I read, every sentence has to be readily understood, at least in its literal meaning, and has to enable me to formulate an opinion: what I’ve read is true or false, right or wrong, pleasant or unpleasant. In ordinary life, on the other hand, there are always countless circumstances that escape my understanding, from the most general to the most banal: I often find myself facing situations in which I wouldn’t know how to express an opinion, in which I prefer to suspend judgment.

While I wait for the unwritten world to become clear to my eyes, there is always within reach a written page that I can dive back into. I hasten to do that, with the greatest satisfaction: there at least, even if I understand only a small part of the whole, I can cultivate the illusion of keeping everything under control.

I think that in my youth, too, things went that way, but at the time I had the illusion that the written world and the unwritten world illuminated one another; that the experiences of life and the experiences of reading were in some way complementary, and every step forward in one field corresponded to a step forward in the other. Today I can say that I know much more about the written world than I once did: within books, experience is always possible, but its reach doesn’t extend beyond the blank margin of the page. Instead, what happens in the world that surrounds me never stops surprising me, frightening me, disorienting me. I’ve witnessed many changes in my lifetime, in the vast world, in society, and many changes in myself, too, and yet I can’t predict anything, not for myself or for the people I know, and even less regarding the future of the human race. I couldn’t predict the future relations between the sexes, between the generations, future developments of society, of cities and nations, what type of peace there will be or what type of war, what significance money will have, which of the objects in daily use will disappear and which appear as new, what sort of vehicles and machines will be used, what the future of the sea will be, of rivers, animals, plants. I know very well that I share this ignorance with those who, on the contrary, claim to know: economists, sociologists, politicians. But the fact that I am not alone gives me no comfort.

I take some comfort in the thought that literature has always understood something more than other disciplines, but this reminds me that the ancients saw in letters a school of wisdom, and I realize how unattainable every idea of wisdom is today. (...)

Some, in order to have contact with the world outside, simply buy the newspaper every morning. I am not so naive. I know that from the papers I get a reading of the world made by others, or, rather, made by an anonymous machine, expert in choosing from the infinite dust of events those which can be sifted out as “news.”

Others, to escape the grip of the written world, turn on the television. But I know that all the images, even those most directly drawn from life, are part of a constructed story, like the ones in the newspapers. So I won’t buy the newspaper, I won’t turn on the television but will confine myself to going out for a walk.

But everything I see on the city streets already has its place in the context of homogenized information. This world I see, which is usually recognized as the world, appears to my eyes—mostly, anyway—already conquered, colonized by words, a world covered by a thick crust of discourses. The facts of our life are already classified, judged, commented on, even before they happen. We live in a world where everything is read even before it starts to exist.

by Italo Calvino, The Paris Review |  Read more:

Image: Atelier of the Boxes, Ivory Writing Tablet and Lid (Medieval, between 1340 and 1360, Northern France) via Wikimedia Commons.