“Is everything all right, ma’am?”
Calvino had been blessed by an uncommon courteousness. On social occasions, even in strange houses, he would rush to be the first to sit on various chairs. He went successively from one chair to another, while the other guests were still standing — and thus seemed quite ill-mannered. However, what Calvino was doing was trying them — the chairs — so as to later be able to offer the most illustrious individual present the most comfortable and suitable one of all, with the wisdom gleaned from his firsthand experience. Mister Calvino did not try wines, he tried chairs.
Calvino then cordially bid the lady farewell and a few meters later took a small piece of paper out of his pocket and wrote the following words:
Provincial
— in space
— in time.
An individual who was provincial in terms of space, he ruminated, was someone who was influenced by and tried to influence the forty square meters around himself. An individual who was provincial in terms of time was someone who was influenced by the preceding afternoon and sought to influence, at the very least, the next two days.
In this regard, he recalled that figure described by the writer T., a person who was so cross-eyed that on Wednesdays he was able to simultaneously see two Sundays.
And Calvino thought: yes, that is definitely a lucid gaze.
Well now, having already reached the end of the afternoon, and well inside a narrow street, Calvino first looked to one side and then the other. They were definitely two parallel straight lines, and he, by mere chance and sheer luck, was right in the middle of them.
He continued to proceed.
Two perfectly parallel straight lines, and he was right in the middle. What luck. Two parallel straight lines!
But gradually something began to change …
and continued to change …
Mister Calvino then stopped (also because he could not proceed any farther).
He had found what so many others had sought: the infinite. He wrote down the address in his notebook.
It was located at the end of Rue de Le grand.
Mister Juarroz
Tedium
Since reality was extremely tedious for Mister Juarroz he stopped thinking only when it was absolutely unavoidable. Situations in which he was obliged to stop thinking included:
— when people spoke to him very loudly
— when people insulted him
— when people pushed him
— when he had to use any useful object around him.
Sometimes, even in these aforementioned situations, Mister Juarroz did not cease to think and therefore other people assumed that:
— he was deaf (because he didn’t listen when people spoke to him very loudly)
— he was a coward (because people would insult him and he wouldn’t react)
— he was a real coward (because people would push him and he wouldn’t react)
— he was clumsy (because things always slipped out of his grasp and would crash to the ground).
However, he was neither deaf, nor a coward, nor was he clumsy. Simply, for Mister Juarroz, reality was a bore.
Dimensions
“Only the left side of a poisonous mushroom is poisonous,” thought Mister Juarroz, who, since he had not gone out in a long while, was convinced that reality had only one dimension, like a drawing on a piece of paper. “One can always eat the other side,” he would say.
Utility and the Drawer
Mister Juarroz insisted on reserving one drawer in his house in which he could store emptiness.
He even used to utter a very strange phrase: “I want to fill this drawer with emptiness.”
Of course, Mister Juarroz’s wife, who found that she had increasingly little space at home, protested on account of what she felt was a terrible use of a square meter.
In order to ensure that his drawer was not occupied by uninteresting objects and transformed into a mere repository, Mister Juarroz would sometimes open it in irritation, showing it to his wife like someone displaying a valuable treasure.
“The drawer is completely empty!” his wife would immediately exclaim.
But Mister Juarroz would shake his head in disagreement. “It’s not yet completely empty. There’s still some space to go.”
“Well, let’s wait another month then,” Mister Juarroz’s wife would murmur, patiently resigned to her fate.
A Theory about Jumps
“The second part of an upward jump is coming down, but the second part of a downward jump isn’t jumping up,” thought Mister Juarroz.
If you jump up from the ground, you return to the ground, but if you jump down from the thirtieth floor, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll go back up thirty floors.
In any case, out of sheer laziness, Mister Juarroz always used the elevator.
Falling
“If we keep in mind that falling is a simple shift in location, a change of the body’s position along a vertical trajectory, then falls will no longer be so scary,” thought Mister Juarroz.
Falling one hundred meters downward and running a hundred meters in the garden, essentially represent the same action, the only difference being the direction of the movement.
“The problem with falls is thus not,” thought Mister Juarroz, “a question of the number of meters.” From left to right or from right to left everything was all right. From top to bottom was when it became difficult.