Description
PIUMA Altrove
A new collection, same passion, same writing experience.
A feather, something delicate and light. In his “Six Memos for the Next Millennium” (1988) the Italian writer Italo Calvino talks about the virtue of lightness as something that is associated “with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard”. In explaining that we shouldn’t misunderstand lightness for superficiality, Calvino quotes the French poet Paul Valéry, who once wrote: “One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather”. While the bird flies unhindered toward an established destination, the feather seems to be floating unwittingly, with no apparent direction.
We cannot, however, always be like the bird, as the destination to go is not known to us all the time. But we can be inspired by the feather that, while floating lightly, defies gravity with its elegant, unpredictable paths in the air. Cherishing lightness means being able to detach from what keeps us anchored and static in the present moment and embrace in this way new, unforeseeable possibilities. We might not know where they will take us, just as it is not possible to predict where the feather will fall, but the lightness it represents suggests we look with hope and imagination toward a better world, a possible utopia.
In our project, the feather becomes once again a writing tool able to channel our thoughts and turns into a symbol of the capacity of pursuing a goal with determination and reason, treasuring, at the same time, the beauty of the unexpected with lightness and creativity.
