Italo Calvino on Lightness (How to be deep but not heavy).

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 VARIATIONS - 5 B...  

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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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