Seeing such an abundance of resources for research, and a life so free from any difficulty in these garden cities, can only make us think: but might it not be that the price for all this is the death of the soul? And the universities are a kind of earthly paradise, so much so that they get on your nerves. And one should not let slip any chances of “talking” to the Americans, of doing something to bridge this abyss which divides us, and it really is an abyss: this is a different world, as far from Europe and our problems as the Moon. Visiting Harvard, Calvino paints elite universities as a kind of isolated utopia:Įven though Harvard is not America, but a kind of Olympus containing the intellectual cream from all over the world, you would have the chance to see a bit of America traveling around. America (or rather New York, which is something quite separate) is not the land of the unforeseen, but it is the land of the richness of life, of the fullness of every hour in the day, the country which gives you the sense of carrying out a huge amount of activity, even though in fact you achieve very little, the country where solitude is impossible (I must have spent maybe just one evening on my own out of the fifty I have spent here, and that was because my date with the girl that I had arranged for that evening fell through: here you have to order everything in advance, they are buying theater tickets for March now, and a girl, even if she happens to be your girl at present, has to know a week in advance the evenings she is going out with you otherwise she goes out with someone else). New York has swallowed me up like a carnivorous plant swallowing a fly, I have been living a breathless life for fifty days now, here life consists of a series of appointments made a week or a fortnight in advance: lunch, cocktail party, dinner, evening party, these make up the various stages of the day which allow you constantly to meet new people, to make arrangements for other lunches, other dinners, other parties and so on ad infinitum.

He begins with a fine addition to literary history’s greatest private recollections of Gotham: In late 1959, 36-year-old Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923–September 19, 1985) received “one of these marvelous grants” from the Ford Foundation and left Italy to travel around America for six months, “without any obligations whatsoever,” as one of seven young writers from seven different countries.įrom Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 ( public library) - which also gave us the beloved author’s timeless wisdom on writing, his prescient meditation on abortion and the meaning of life, and his poetic “CV” - comes his remarkably dimensional portrait of his experience of America.

Italo calvino art