On the final page of Italo Calvino’s lovely poem of a fiction, Invisible Cities, Marco Polo speaks his final words to Kublai Khan:
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
Dedicated readers will remember this conclusion, I suppose, and ponder its implications. What moves me is Polo’s matter-of-factness. The great Venetian traveler and storyteller speaks casually of “the inferno where we live every day.” It’s neither a tabloid headline nor a paraphrase of Sartre’s vulgar “Hell is other people.” Polo’s first strategy for escaping perdition is unsatisfactory, rooted as it is in bad faith. At best, denial works only tentatively.
The second requires us to dwell in “negative capability,” defined by Keats as “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” How do we identify those who “are not inferno?” Polo never says but suggests we will somehow know, and I think we do. But how to “make them endure, give them space?” In William Weaver’s translation from the Italian, Polo pointedly does not say, “Join them. Learn from them. Make common cause with them.”
How to make another endure? And how does it relate to giving them “space?” It occurs to me that Polo might be speaking of parents and their responsibility for children. We supply them with food and medicine, encouragement and moral examples, the bounty of emotions and intellect, to strengthen their chances of endurance in this infernal world. By giving them space “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason,” they fail or succeed, and endure.
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"Giving space" -- also, perhaps, another aspect of intimacy? -- which is to taste all the flavors of one's own aloneness, and to give way to the same in the other person. Now that my daughters are all grown (one a mother at 30, the other two in mid-20s), the earlier giving of space (insofar as my wife and I made way for it, which certainly varied in leeway) seems to bear late fruit. In different degrees and slants, my daughters seem to enjoy bringing up the topic -- though I suspect they're all actually groping to understand not only their pasts, but the new relationships of their present time ... I have a photo of Calvino on my wall. His impossible premises move us speedily to questions and images of how we manage to live with each other. Master of form, a fanciful mind deeply informed, a vision broad enough to include everything human -- cities, histories, insitutions, philosophies. The revolutionary, unaccountably sweetened.
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