Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino

form, acquires a meaning—not fixed, not definitive, not hardened into a mineral immobility, but alive as an organism. Poetry is the great enemy of chance, in spite of also being a daughter of chance and knowing that, in the last resort, chance will win the battle. “Un coup de des n'abolira jamais le hasard” (One throw of the dice will never annul chance).
    It is in this context that we should view the reevaluation of logical, geometrical, and metaphysical procedures that prevailed in the figurative arts during the first decades of this century and thereafter in literature. The emblem of the crystal might be used to distinguish a whole constellation of poets and writers, very different from one another, such as Paul Valery in France, Wallace Stevens in the United States, Gottfried Benn in Germany, Fernando Pessoa in Portugal, Ramon Gomez de la Serna in Spain, Massimo Bontempelli in Italy, and Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina.
    The crystal, with its precise faceting and its ability to refract light, is the model of perfection that I have always cherished as an emblem, and this predilection has become even more meaningful since we have learned that certain properties of the birth and growth of crystals resemble those of the most rudimentary biological creatures, forming a kind of bridge between the mineral world and living matter.
    Among the scientific books into which I poke my nose in search of stimulus for the imagination, I recently happened to read that the models for the process of formation of living beings “are best visualized by the
crystal
on one side (invariance of specific structures) and
thefiame
on the other (constancy of external forms in spite of relentless internal agitation).” I am quoting from Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's introduction to the volume devoted to the debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky in1975 at the Centre Royaumont
{Language and Uarning
, 1980, p. 6). The contrasting images of flame and crystal are used to make visible the alternatives offered to biology, and from this pass on to theories of language and the ability to learn. For the moment I will leave aside the implications for the philosophy of science embodied in the positions stated by Piaget, who is for the principle of “order out of noise”—the flame—and Chomsky, who is for the “self-organizing system,” the crystal.
    What interests me here is the juxtaposition of these two symbols, as in one of those sixteenth-century emblems I mentioned in my last lecture. Crystal and flame: two forms of perfect beauty that we cannot tear our eyes away from, two modes of growth in time, of expenditure of the matter surrounding them, two moral symbols, two absolutes, two categories for classifying facts and ideas, styles and feelings. A short while ago I suggested a “Party of the Crystal” in twentieth-century literature, and I think one could draw up a similar list for a “Party of the Flame.” I have always considered myself a partisan of the crystal, but the passage just quoted teaches me not to forget the value of the flame as a way of being, as a mode of existence. In the same way, I would like those who think of themselves as disciples of the flame not to lose sight of the tranquil, arduous lesson of the crystal.
    A more complex symbol, which has given me greater possibilities of expressing the tension between geometric rationality and the entanglements of human lives, is that of the city. The book in which I think I managed to say most remains
Invisible Cities
, because I was able to concentrate all my reflections, experiments, and conjectures on a single symbol; and also because I built up a many-faceted structure in which each brief text is close to the others in a series that does not imply logical sequence or a hierarchy, but a network in which one can follow multiple routes and draw multiple, ramified conclusions.
    In my
Invisible Cities
every concept and value turns out to be double—even exactitude. At a