Read “On a Winter's Night” … elsewhere
The idea is beautiful that by putting on a pair of Apple Vision or, perhaps in a few years, Ray-Bans, produced by our patriotic Luxottica, we could migrate into a world of fiction, but still pleasant.
Here we will be able to replicate many beautiful daily actions, for example read a great book like If a traveler a winter night by Isuch Calvino, of which it occurs today is the 100th anniversary of his birth which took place on October 15, 1923.
In that "if" there is the whole essence of this future as well as of the book itself. It all depends on what world it will be.
However, if we understand it in the best way and most suited to our nature as people, in that world there will be ourselves and not our avatars, it will be us with our expanded faculties and our personality. The body can also be made of pixels.
Hollywood is already there
This, let's face it, metaverse will certainly not be that of Zuckerberg with his trunks and smooth puppets. It will rather be what Hollywood offers us. If you have seen Barbie well there is already an idea of what alternative worlds our imagination and above all our collective creative and emotional intelligence can create.
In these parallel worlds we will be ourselves, there will be people like there are in films, which are also made of pixels. There will be no plasticine buildings and Formica-like coverings. There will be buildings, roads, forests and oceans and above all there will be people with feelings, stories, pains and desires.
In fact the Hollywood has already invented the metaverse and before Hollywood, literature. Just convert it to code. They are already working on it in Silicon Valley.
Speaking of imagination
If we understand the future this way, as ourselves in an elsewhere but with increased capabilities, it is also possible to imagine what it might be like to continue reading stories by Italo Calvino.
Italo Calvino, who had some formidable futurological capabilities and that he had already guessed that one matrix is the basis of every reality, he described it very well in one of his most amazing books that tease you with every line, his If a traveler a winter night. We offer you a step in which everything is already there. The titles are from the editorial staff, the text is entirely by Calvino.
Disconnect
You are about to start reading the new novel If a traveler a winter night by Italo Calvino. Take it easy. Collect yourself, push away every other thought from you. Let the world around you fade into indistinctness. The door is better closed; there's always the television on over there. Tell others immediately: "No, I don't want to watch television!" He raises his voice, otherwise they won't hear you:
"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!"
Maybe they didn't hear you, with all that noise; say it louder, shout:
«I'm starting to read Italo Calvino's new novel!»
Or if you don't want to, don't say it; Let's hope they leave you alone.
Take the most comfortable position: sitting, lying, curled up, lying down. Lying on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In the armchair, on the sofa, on the rocking chair, on the deck chair, on the pouf. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On the bed, of course, or in the bed. You can also stand upside down, in a yoga position, with the book upside down, of course.
Take it easy
Of course, you can't find the ideal position for reading. Once upon a time we read standing in front of a lectern. We were used to standing still. This is how we rested when we were tired of riding. On horseback no one ever thought of reading; yet now the idea of reading while mounted, the book resting on the horse's mane, perhaps hanging from the horse's ears with a special harness, seems attractive to you. With your feet in the stirrups you should be very comfortable for reading; keeping your feet raised is the first condition for enjoying reading.
Well, what are you waiting for? Stretch your legs, even stretch your feet on a cushion, on two cushions, on the armrests of the sofa, on the wings of the armchair, on the tea table, on the desk, on the piano, on the globe. Take off your shoes first. If you want to keep your feet elevated; if not, put them back. Now don't stand there with your shoes in one hand and your book in the other.
Fix the light and pee
Adjust the light so that it doesn't tire your eyes. Do it now, because as soon as you are immersed in reading there will be no way to move you anymore. Make sure that the page does not remain in shadow, a thickening of black letters on a gray background, uniform as a pack of mice; but be careful that too strong a light does not shine on it and that it does not reflect on the cruel white of the paper, gnawing at the shadows of the characters as in a southern midday. Try to foresee now everything that can avoid interrupting your reading. Cigarettes at hand, if you smoke, an ashtray. What's still there? Do you have to pee? Well, you'll know.
You are now ready
Now yes. Don't worry, open the book to the first page, no, to the last, first you want to see how long it is. It's not too long, luckily. Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot live or think except in fragments of time that each move away along its own trajectory and immediately disappear. We can only find the continuity of time in the novels of that era in which time no longer appeared to have stopped and not yet exploded, an era that lasted about a hundred years, and then that was it.
. . .
PS
Calvino's 100th anniversary is sold out. There is still a hole to insert two books, ... two polar opposite books. Not in the sense of content, but precisely geographical.
If you drill a hole from the center of Milan, where the publisher of the first book is based, without stopping, you emerge in Wellington in New Zealand where the author of the second lives.
The first book is by Domenico Scarpa, literary critic and many other things, who lives and works in Pisa. His Calvino makes the conch. The construction of a writer, publisher Hoepli, does just what the very Calvinian title promises, among other things.
The second is a brilliant and original tribute to Calvino's most sophisticated work. AND Intelligible cities by David Groves, goWare editor. It is written in English but it could have been written in Italian as the author dominates our language and our literature. For more than thirty years Groves taught Italian at Victoria University in the capital of Aotearoa-New Zealand.
Calvino is truly everywhere, here, elsewhere and at the antipodes.
