Collection of Sand
Italo Calvino
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0544146468
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Italo Calvino’s unbounded curiosity and masterly imagination are displayed in peak form in Collection of Sand, the last of his works published during his lifetime. Here he applies his graceful intellect to the delights of the visual world, in essays on subjects ranging from cuneiform and antique maps to Mexican temples and Japanese gardens. Never before translated into English, Collection of Sand is an incisive and often surprising meditation on observation and knowledge, the difference between the world as we perceive it and the world as it is.
“Beautifully translated by Martin McLaughlin . . . To read [Collection of Sand] is to enter the presence of an exceptionally fervent and fertile mind . . . A brilliant collection that may change the way you see the world around you.” — PD Smith, Guardian
by Gilbert Lascault, has a catalogue in which there is an article by a mathematician, Pierre Rosenstiehl. The fact is that knots, as linear configurations in three dimensions, are the object of a mathematical theory. Among the problems the theory opens up are those relating to the Borromean Knot or Chain (three rings linked together, but any two of the rings are linked only by the third). The Borromean Knot was also very important for Jacques Lacan: see the chapter ‘Ronds de ficelle’ (Knots of
is that these vegetal equivalents of words change shape and colour over the course of the year and even more so over the course of years: these complete or partial changes were factored in when the garden-poem was planned. Then the plants die and are replaced by others that are similar and are laid out in the same places: as the centuries go by the garden is continually remade but always remains the same. And this is another constant highlighted by these gardens: in Japan antiquity does not have
Iran. The mobet is a young Parsee Indian from Bombay (for more than a thousand years the Parsees in India have kept alive the most ancient religion of their ancestors who fled from Persia after the Islamic conquest); handsome, proud, with an attitude bordering on smugness; the white shirt he wears, the little white cap on his head, the white veil that covers his mouth to stop the sacred fire being contaminated by human breath all give him the look of a surgeon. He revives the fire with his little
also in these remote regions of Persia had continued for centuries to be practised in secret, around fires that were always kept lit on the mountains and in houses. With all the wariness of those who live amongst infidels, the Mazdeans continue to keep the fire locked away, visible only through a grating. But even when the altars flamed high on the monumental steps of Darius’ Persepolis, the true chamber of fire was always a room without windows, aerated solely by air-holes and inaccessible to
difference, perhaps one might say the hard core of America, in other words the fact that it always has something to say to Europe—from Columbus’s first arrival there to today—something that Europe does not know. The allegorical constant is stressed by the final piece in the exhibition, a French painting from the end of the nineteenth century reminding us that the Statue of Liberty was designed and built in Paris between 1871 and 1886. In order to complete the project the restorer of Notre Dame,