The Secret of Lightness
Advice for the Internet Age from a medieval poet.
I.
In Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, ten young people flee plague-ridden Florence for the countryside. They take up residence in an abandoned villa and spin wild tales. A woman’s brothers decapitate her lover; she collects his head, plants it in a pot of basil, and carries the pot everywhere she goes. An abbot drugs a man, locks him in a cellar, has him beaten twice daily, and convinces him he’s died and gone to purgatory — all so the abbot can sleep with the man’s wife. On it goes: clever schemes, hapless thieves, unscrupulous priests, and so, so much adultery.
Another tale relates a confrontation between Guido Cavalcanti, a poet accused of impiety, and a party of wealthy revelers:
… As [Guido] was standing between the porphyry columns of the church and these tombs, with the door of the church shut fast behind him, Messer Betto and his company came riding along the Piazza di Santa Reparata. Catching sight of Guido among the tombs, they said, “Let’s go and pick a quarrel.” Spurring their horses, they came down upon him in play, like a charging squad, before he was aware of them. They began: “Guido, you refuse to be of our company; but look, when you have proved that there is no God, what will you have accomplished?” Guido, seeing himself surrounded by them, answered quickly: “Gentlemen, you may say anything you wish to me in your own home.” Then, resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble, he leaped over it and, landing on the other side, made off and rid himself of them.
Nestled among the elaborate mischief and mayhem of the Decameron’s other stories, this compact episode is easy to overlook. Yet, if we’re willing to linger, it offers a glimpse of something magical.
I first met Guido not in the Decameron, but in Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Drawing on a lifetime’s immersion in great literature, Calvino commends a series of virtues to writers of the future. The first and greatest of these virtues is lightness.1 Lightness is about commitment and independence. It’s about knowing when to say, “This, I hold,” and when to say, “This, I let go.”
Often we hold too much. Our baggage keeps us firmly clamped to the earth, encircled by our most immediate concerns and circumstances. Often we hold too little. We waste our lives flitting from attraction to attraction, peak to peak, failing to grasp what is truly valuable. But those who have the virtue of lightness hold exactly what they ought to hold. They treasure the beautiful, the kind, and the interesting; they dismiss the ugly, the malicious, and the trivial. Such people can make great leaps above the powers and fashions of their world without losing themselves in airy oblivion.
Guido is a mighty icon of lightness. From him we learn that lightness grants autonomy: neither secular elites nor religious authority, both represented by Messer Betto’s company, pose Guido a decisive obstacle. We learn that lightness transcends circumstance: it is in a cemetery, devoid of shelter and comfort for the living, that Guido so masterfully displays his vivacity. And we learn that lightness employs transformative recognitions — re-seeings of the world, not as it demands to be seen, but as it really is underneath. It is Guido’s transformative recognition of Messer Betto’s wealthy and fashionable youths as the cemetery’s undead that enables his escape. If he hadn’t seen these people for what there were, if he hadn’t been able to laugh off their pretensions, Guido couldn’t have thought up such an audacious exit.
II.
Boccaccio composed the Decameron around 1350, as the Black Death was devastating Europe and the Middle East. Humanity in such a moment needed a sage like Guido. We needed someone who could, at least for a time, rise high enough to see beyond all the suffering and the craziness it inspired (remember the flagellants?). But while the Black Death was bleak, all human history is bleak in its own way. War, poverty, and illness never quit the Earth. In every age, many with knowledge and power exploit the vulnerable, claiming that their ways alone are right. We will always need masters of lightness to help show us the way free. Understanding this, Calvino selects Guido’s escape as his foremost bequest to the future:
Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times — noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring — belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars.2
Consider the supposed vitality of our times: software-as-a-service, targeted advertising, gamification, artificial intelligence, anonymous gig work, endless streams of “content.”
Big Tech markets these inventions as facilitators of lightness, promising limitless convenience, flexibility, and fun. In reality, however, these inventions are designed to weigh us down. Their owner-operators direct our resources (attention, labor, creativity, even water) toward their own priorities at our expense. They entice us with new opportunities and good deals, then change the terms once we depend on their services (see Cory Doctorow on enshittification). They try to reduce human persons — organic centers of consciousness, emotion, and intelligence — to mere bundles of quantified behavior that can be manipulated and coerced at will.
When these plans succeed, inertia becomes the defining quality of our lives. We stop asking questions, imagining alternatives, and attempting new approaches. We work when the automated boss tells us to work, watch what is “suggested” for us to watch, and keep on thinking the same envious or despairing or righteously angry thoughts as everyone else.
But digital technologies don’t have to be weights around our necks. They offer many real opportunities for empowerment and liberation. And while we need collective action and better governance to secure many of these opportunities, individual choices about technology matter just as much. Each of us must make careful judgments about which and when and how we engage. Such judgments require genuine lightness, not the simulacrum offered by Silicon Valley. They require the independence and alacrity Guido displays in the cemetery, aided by transformative recognitions of some flashy new inventions as the brain-eating zombies they really are.
So how does one acquire lightness? Personal technology audits (as described here) can help you invest your attention only where you want it. Short, periodic renunciations, like those some Christians practice each year during Lent, can help you maintain independence from platforms and activities that distort your priorities. Reading books from earlier centuries can expand your thinking beyond currently-dominant paradigms and trending topics.
My favorite advice for cultivating lightness is what political scientist James Scott calls “anarchist calisthenics.”3 Each of us will face situations in which we must break an important rule or prescription — perhaps a law, or an order from a boss, or an unwritten social convention — to uphold our principles. Doing this is hard! (Recall the infamous Milgram experiment, in which many ordinary citizens were willing to administer lethal electric shocks when so ordered by an authority figure.) So Scott suggests making small acts of insubordination a regular practice. At least once a week, break a trivial and unreasonable rule, or do something harmless that your peers will find passé. Get into the habit of judging for yourself whether the rules and expectations you encounter are worth upholding, whether the trends of the moment are worth following. Keep your agency and your morality in good shape, as Scott says. Then, when the time comes to break a really important rule or risk viral condemnation — when you, like Guido, are backed into a corner — you’ll be ready. You will have the strength and agility to make your own way out, even if that way is steep.
III.
These practical suggestions concern the acquisition of lightness, offering a few places from which to begin. But the first, arduous acquisition of a virtue looks very different from its mature form. Nothing I’ve written so far adequately describes the dazzling feats of which a true master of lightness is capable.
So let me ask you a question. If you had to choose just one thing you could be sure of being or having or doing before you die, what would it be? On what would you spend your “one wild and precious life”?
Perhaps you would choose to create a work of art that would touch minds and hearts for generations to come. Perhaps you would choose to nurture a large and close-knit family, ensuring that a dozen souls would know they were loved and give love in return. Perhaps you would choose to have a great adventure among the natural splendors of the Earth, or simply to care for a certain small plot of ground. Perhaps you would choose a lifetime of religious devotion or quiet service to the poor. Perhaps you would choose to be a star athlete, or a gifted fashion designer, or a scientist whose discoveries would illuminate our planet’s distant past. Perhaps, finding yourself in terrible circumstances, you would choose to sacrifice everything to make sure another person would get to make this choice.
I feel the pull of all these, and more. But right now, if I had just the one chance, I’d choose something else. I’d choose to become the sort of person who values the human spirit and its bearers above all, who cherishes that element in us which cannot be touched by circumstances or choices or labels. I’d choose to channel this consciousness into some ecstatic gesture of resistance and joy. I’d choose to do something so implausible, so profligate, that all our careful calculations — of efficiency and prudence, necessity and just desert — would fail to compute. I’d choose to use an entire jar of priceless perfume to honor one person’s body, or airdrop candy equipped with miniature parachutes into a starving city, or give a cello recital in the middle of an active war zone. I’d choose to launch myself high above the Earth, careless of gravity’s revenge, and, for just a moment, claim the bright grace of the sky.
Although I’d never know for sure, I’d hope to make my leap where someone else — someone who needed it — could see. I’d imagine this person treasuring it up in their heart, using it years later to power their own tiny, impossible feat of transcendence, and inspiring someone else in turn. From there I’d cast my mind back through all the history I’d learned, and forward through all the future I’d projected, and find it as never before. This time, there would be no mighty empires or revolutionary movements, no good or bad people, no divisions of period or sensibility or creed. There would be only a vast, delicate network of moments in which a person tried for something beautiful that made no sense, and succeeded.
That is lightness. It’s the exception, the swerve, the sidetrack, the caper, the escape. It’s the refusal to conform to any one system, however popular or powerful or rational or just that system may be. It’s the freedom to change your mind, to try again, to keep the words “and yet…” in the innermost chamber of your heart. It’s your birthright, there for the claiming, no matter what you’ve done or seem likely to do in the future.
IV.
Return with me, once more, to Guido’s story in the Decameron.
Do you see how it ends?
… being very nimble, he leaped over it and, landing on the other side, made off and rid himself of them.
Guido is there for one brief, glorious instant, and then he drops back out of view. We are not told what happens next. He lives the rest of his life outside the scope of our observation and our appraisal.
That’s the end I wish for everyone.
No curtain call, no Last Judgment, no digital archive of everything we’ve ever done.
Just a glimpse of something swift and luminous, and a few footsteps, leading out into the unknown.
Calvino’s other virtues are quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity (he died before he could write about the sixth virtue, consistency). He presents these virtues as belonging to texts and ideas, but we can profitably extend them to persons, as I do for lightness here.
Both this passage and the excerpt from the Decameron above are translated by Patrick Creagh.
In Two Cheers for Anarchism, Fragment 1.