Italo Calvino on Lightness (How to be deep but not heavy).
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ก.ค. 2024
- Italo Calvino on lightness. Calvino wrote a beautiful essay on lightness not long before he died. In this video I explore what lightness meant for Italo Calvino. Calvino contrasted lightness with heaviness but not with depth. Friedrich Nietzsche via The Gay Science and Beethoven via the Diabelli Variations join in to help with our conversation. I end on a meditation on what lightness meant for me when I got ill with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and could not talk or walk.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Lightness
0:00 What's in this video: Italo Calvino, Nietzsche, Beethoven, Vlad's view
01:20 Italo Calvino Lightness (from Six Memos for the Next Millennium)
02:31 Friedrich Nietzsche - those Greeks were superficial out of profundity
03:33 Review of Nietzsche The Gay Science (concluding paragraph)
05:40 Beethoven Diabelli Variations opus 120, Alfred Brendel, lightness.
06:51 How Vlad got Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and what he learned about lightness
At the end of his life, Italo Calvino wrote an essay on lightness. You can find it in Calvino's collection Six Memos for the Next Millennium, originally intended as Norton Poetry Lectures. I review briefly the essay on lightness from this book by Italo Calvino.
Link to my Diabelli Variations video - • Beethoven's DIABELLI V...
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#vladvexlershow offers a guide to surviving the 21st century. Surviving it politically, culturally, aesthetically, and coming away with a vision of the world that is at once truthful but also hopeful.
Professionally, I am a philosopher working in ethics and musicology. Some current projects include 1. What it means for philosophers to be funny. 2. Isaiah Berlin’s political ideas. 3. Nietzsche’s moral psychology. 4. Laughter in absolute music. I am currently writing a book about Isaiah Berlin.
I coach artists and arts organisations. I help individual artists develop their talent for developing their talent.
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Share what you think in the comments!
CHAPTERS
0:00 Lightness
0:00 What's in this video: Calvino, Nietzsche, Beethoven, Vlad's view
01:20 Italo Calvino essay on Lightness from Six Memos for the Next Millennium
02:31 Friedrich Nietzsche - Those Greeks were superficial out of profundity
03:33 Review of Nietzsche The Gay Science (concluding paragraph)
05:40 Beethoven Diabelli Variations opus 120, Alfred Brendel, lightness.
06:51 How Vlad got Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and what he learned about lightness
Wonderful
I would like you send you these two gems (or should I say jams):
th-cam.com/video/Vb3L_YDZzv8/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/H7rrIlPu-Ao/w-d-xo.html
Many thanks
I am happy and honored to have discovered your channel! I feel as if I had just made a lucky turn in my drifting and time-spendthrifting on youtube!
That's such a beautiful comment. I am happy you've found your way here! Wishing you very well.
I cannot help but feel a certain lightness.... from my joy in the discovery and watching of this video. Thank you!!!
So glad to hear!
Yes Vlad! Such a great video. Living in lightness is something that I've learnt to develop. You've put into words so excellently how I've slowly been able to see life despite the heartache of ME! Living in the unknown. And having seen improvement over the last few weeks I have felt real joy, but if my baseline drops again, I'll be able to live with it. Thanks so much for this! I've been recording a song for ME awareness week (with my limited musical ability) and the song lyrics deal with some of the really heavy issues of isolation yet its got a light feel to it somehow in the melody and beat and I wondered if the contrast didn't work but now I think it does.
Looking forward to the song Daniel! Esp as we turn four hundred years old. Thank you so much for your lovely response. I’m happy you have had more freedom.
Loved to hear some discussion about this passage. I'm reading The Six Memoirs and am astounded at how these meditations on literature are so applicable to life philosophically. I've always been drawn to intuitions of lightness, weight and balance within art forms and feel like it's inspired me in the best of times to act accordingly; bringing me peace, tranquility and meaning in light of the dread and chaos of the world. Calvino's words and your exploration has helped me to bring these intuitions to something more concrete and discernible. And for that, I thank you!
What a gorgeous comment! Thank you so so much for sharing a little of what lightness - and Calvino - has meant to you.
Thank you for this video. In the constantly screaming world( and streaming world), these are the kind of words that ground one. It’s like an anchor in a roaring sea. Wonderful content and hope you do well!
What a totally wonderful video!
Thank you for seeing!
Better than like❤️! As I get comfy tonight, I plan to listen again and dissect. Since I am not as skilled as a surgeon, perhaps I will just mull over. Thank you Vlad. You put my mind to work which I so appreciate. Diane
Some more references to Lightness: (i) Parmenides, (ii) Milan Kundera's 'Unbearable Lightness of Being' and (iii) Donald Palmer's "Looking At Philosophy: The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy Made Lighter" - *THE* book I kept returning to in my novice philosophy days, recommended for any beginner. Keep up the excellent work, Vlad! Every new post is eagerly awaited.
Excellent choice of sound que in the beginning!
Love this ! I’m basically a serious person and dealing with the discouragement and discomfort of ME. Lightness for me sometimes comes as a surprise of a silly bit of humor sent to me from my wickedly humorous and irreverent family. Then we all just get really silly. ❤ Love! .
what a lovely video
Italo would have loved it
grazie, Vlad
My English is not so good as I liked, specially English written I pay atention the translation but you are so powerful expresion and autenticity...Bless you
I' m writting from Spain.
This is for you: OLE and OLEEEEE
I' m Happy and very grateful for finding you and your Channel
Thanks a lot♥️👏👏👏👏
💫 Beautiful...
I think i need this, thankyou
Great video.
Absolutely delightfull.
Thank you!
I am watching this video at 2am. As luck would have it, I came to it at a particularly difficult moment, as I have once again realized that the one thing I want above all right now - a few hours of sleep - is not available to me tonight. Too much pain because of a nasty flare up I am dealing with. Not ME but another autoimmune disease. So what else am I to do with my sad self than watch one of my favorite channels? :) This is the perfect video for me right now. I hope to rediscover lightness you describe so eloquently. I have known it in the past and hope to run into it again just around the corner :)
☕ Have only read Italo Calvino in a collection of Short Short Stories and he blew me away. Gotta find a copy of that Essay on Lightness.
I like this one best...yeah...the videography tickled me so! The subject matter is a good one to muse upon...it reminds me of diamonds, the way they are formed is so profound and then they just SHINE!
Thanks so much Suzanne. I feel some of the older videos on the channel are not very good!
@@VladVexler you're wrong. This one is an absolute gem just like Suzanne said!
What awesome background music.
yes, vlad: we know too much. the lightness in antiquity was that of the free men. it was up to the rest of people, mostly enslaved, to ponder (oh! do ponder..) on the other side of the equation. centuries later there was a similar lightness in the lives of european aristocracy: shala la la... (thinking of the 18th century especially). myself being a fan of proust i do realise that the world he depicts is one where "la beauté inutile" of some thing or another can occupy your thoughts for days..
Good man! Love that :)
Thank you!
Very much something to aim for in life, especially when the chips are down. Why though, do we have a proclivity towards heaviness when lightness and deepness are obviously better for us? Bad habits? Conditioning? Genetics? Old age? And why does it seem as though the more forward thinking we try to be, the more heaviness we invite into our lives? So many more questions. Thanks for this Vlad.
I come to realize that you might be talking about the child, I call it. The thing to protect, inside. I found the need to conform, to belong tends to kill or hinder the child and make it into an "adult"... we are very different, yet very similar.
Love Cosmicomics and must re-read! Remembering the uncle mud skipper that wanted nothing to do with all that walking-on-land stuff 🥂
It takes bravery to develop a lightness of mind. Some of us prefer to keep our heads down in order to not be slapped by fate for having been too bold and allowed ourselves to forget the inevitability of being struck with grief and suffering. The danger is in the huge contrast between lightness and darkness. It is too painful to lose that light. Sometimes one wonders why we have to be so darned sensitive!
Bravo..!
Glad you liked
The Ukraine War has prevented me from working for a month. Thanks for the food for thought.
I am so sorry for that impact.
❤
Plan A: "Participation in the world." Plan B: "Being in the world." I would like to hear your comments on Schopenhauer.
That will come at some point!
Aren’t we learning now that we can’t live without it?
I watched it for the Calvino, and now thinking about the connection to Moshe Feldenkrais....
Please, I really must know. I cannot rest until I find out. What is the music in the background? It haunts me and makes me want to weep!
I think it’s a recording circa 1910 from Ukraine. It’s public domain and you can find a version of it here th-cam.com/video/wYwds-FVuao/w-d-xo.html
Thank you so much. It is simply wonderful.
What is the name of the background music? I know its kletzmir but i dont no the title
This is actually quite interesting.
Do you speak italian?
You got an almost perfect pronunciation
What is that music in the background?
I can only imagine in the lightness of possibility, what it would feel like to walk around my prophet.
Is it possible that there exists an opposite to this? Like a heavy shallowness?
Yes!!! I would argue that Heidegger is in some of his writing a wonderful example of heavy shallowness.
Interesting idea. For me it would be Foucault, for example. Maybe even Sartre too. Coming to think of it, not a rare phenomenon at all.
The Sea Inside (2004) ...
Similar to micro-dosing shrooms....
To me I associate these images and thoughts with French 20th century and Russian (19th century?) literature; a kind of enjoyment through misery, a cultural preoccupation with one’s own suffering, and a celebration of life at the same time. It makes little sense to me. Like much of European culture I associate it with the inability to divest the “I” from the will, the ego, the rational self.
It is for me the greatest failure of European thought.
Here is something whimsical from Zhuangzi:
Yun Jiang, rambling to the east, having been borne along on a gentle breeze, suddenly encountered Hong Mang, who was rambling about, slapping his buttocks and hopping like a bird. Amazed at the sight, Yun Jiang stood reverentially, and said to the other, 'Venerable Sir, who are you? and why are you doing this ?' Hong Mang went on slapping his buttocks and hopping like a bird, but replied, 'I am enjoying myself.' Yun Jiang said, 'I wish to ask you a question.' Hong Mang lifted up his head, looked at the stranger, and said, 'Pooh!' Yun Jiang, however, continued, 'The breath of heaven is out of harmony; the breath of earth is bound up; the six elemental influences do not act in concord; the four seasons do not observe their proper times. Now I wish to blend together the essential qualities of those six influences in order to nourish all living things - how shall I go about it?' Hong Mang slapped his buttocks, hopped about, and shook his head, saying, 'I do not know; I do not know!'
Speak for yourself > #boycottAmazon you madman
You are a concerto.
really funny, i can't identify with this at all, probably being neurodivergent.