About lightness

Attention to detail, attention to detail, linguistic precision, philology as a whole, far from being legacies of pedantry, are rather the most authentic corollaries of lightness. Ambitious objective, this noun (which is, rather, a lifestyle): requires commitment and work, perseverance and determination.

On the contrary, superficiality, conformism, sloppiness ideally fall into the field of heaviness. Of that heaviness that is made of volatile and soon forgotten fashions, of thoughts smart which become the catchphrases of a period and then end up in oblivion. How often does it happen that we feel the full gravity of that soup mainstream in which we swim every day?

Speaking of lightness, Calvino, in his American lessons tells us that

Lucretius wants to write the poem of matter but immediately warns us that the true reality of this matter is made up of invisible corpuscles. He is the poet of physical concreteness, seen in its permanent and immutable substance, but first of all he tells us that the void is just as concrete as solid bodies. Lucretius' greatest concern seems to be to prevent the weight of matter from crushing us. When establishing the rigorous mechanical laws that determine every event, he feels the need to allow the atoms to make unpredictable deviations from the straight line, such as to guarantee freedom to both matter and human beings. The poetry of the invisible, the poetry of infinite unpredictable potential, as well as the poetry of nothingness are born from a poet who has no doubts about the physicality of the world. This pulverization of reality also extends to the visible aspects, and it is there that Lucretius' poetic quality excels.

The data is not irrelevant: lightness is not synonymous with simplicity. The opposite, rather: it is only through continuous work on oneself and then on the texts that one manages to subtract gravity, the weight of too much and too little, empty cerebrality and baroque conceptualism. But lightness is also that objective reached which will shun superficiality, cliché, conformism, ...

Literature, probably, is where the discussion should resume. After having freed herself, however, from all the burden of banality, clichés and ambitions underground, which it persists in wanting to feed on, resulting only in the faded image of something that does not belong to it.