world memory

Italo Calvino: World Memory

Here’s why I called for you, Müller. Now that my resignation has been accepted, you are to become my successor: your appointment as director is imminent. Please don’t pretend this is such a big surprise: the rumour has been doing the rounds for some time and I’m sure that you will have heard it yourself. Then there is no doubt that of the young elite in our organization, you are the most competent, the one who knows, you could say, all the secrets of our work. Or so at least it would seem. Allow me to explain: I am not speaking to you on my own initiative, I was told to do so by our superiors. There are only one or two things that you don’t yet know, Müller, and the time has come to fill you in. You imagine, as does everybody else for that matter, that our organization has for many years been preparing the greatest document centre ever conceived, an archive that will bring together and catalogue everything that is known about every person, animal and thing, by way of general inventory not only of the present but of the past too, of everything that has ever been since time began, in short a general and simultaneous history of everything, or rather a catalogue of everything moment by moment. And that is indeed what we have been working on and we can feel satisfied that the project is well advanced: not only have we already put the contents of the most important libraries of the world, and likewise the archives and museums and newspaper annals of every nation, on our punch cards, but also a great deal of documentation gathered ad hoc, person by person, place by place. And all this material is being put through a reduction process that brings it down to the essential, condensed, miniaturized minimum, a process whose limits have yet to be established; just as all existing and possible images are being filed in minute spools of micro-film, while microscopic bobbins of magnetic tape hold all sounds that have ever been and ever can be recorded. What we are planning to build is a centralized archive of human kind, as we are attempting to store it in the smallest possible space, along the lines of the individual memories of our brains.

But it is hardly worth my while repeating this to someone who won admission to our organization with a project entitled, ‘The British Museum in a Nutshell’. Relatively speaking, you have only been with us a few years, but by now you are as familiar with the working of our laboratories as I myself, who am or was the foundation’s director. I would never have left this job, I assure you, if I still felt that I had the energy. But since my wife’s mysterious disappearance, I have sunk into a depression from which I have still not recovered. It is only right that our superiors – accepting what are anyway my own wishes – should decide to replace me. Hence it falls to me to inform you of those official secrets which have so far been kept from you.
What you are not aware of is the true purpose of our work. It has to do with the end of the world, Müller. We are working in expectation of an imminent disappearance of life on Earth. We are working so that all may not be in vain, so that we can transmit all we know to others, even though we don’t know who they are or what they know.
May I offer you a cigar? Forecasts that the Earth will not be able to support life, or at least human life, should not distress us unduly. We have all been aware for some time that the sun is halfway through its lifespan: however well things went, in four or five billion years everything would be over. That is, in a short while the problem would have presented itself anyway; what is new is that the deadline is now very much nearer, we have no time to lose, that’s all. Obviously the extinction of our species is not a happy prospect, but crying about it offers only the same empty consolation as when we mourn the death of an individual. (I’m still thinking of my dear Angela, do forgive my emotions.) There are doubtless millions of planets supporting life forms similar to our own; it hardly matters whether our image lives on in them or whether it be their descendants rather than our own who carry on where we left off. What does matter is that we give them our memory, the general memory put together by the organization of which you, Müller, are about to be made director.
No need to be overawed; the scope of your work will remain as it is at present. The system of communicating our memory to other planets is being designed by another sector of the organization; we already have our work cut out, we needn’t even concern ourselves whether they decide on optical or acoustic media. It may even be that it’s not a question of transmitting information at all, but of putting it in a safe place, beneath the earth’s crust: wandering through space the remains of our planet may one day be found by extra-galactic archeologists. Nor do we even have to worry about what code or codes will be chosen: there’s a sector exclusively dedicated to looking for a way of making our stock of information intelligible to whatever linguistic system the others may use. For you, now that you know, I can assure you that nothing has changed, except the responsibility that rests on your shoulders. That’s what I wanted to talk over with you a little.
What will the human race be at the moment of extinction? A certain quantity of information about itself and the world, a finite quantity, given that it will no longer be able to propagate itself and grow. For a certain time, the universe enjoyed an excellent opportunity to gather and elaborate information; and to create it, to bring forth information there where in other circumstances there would have been no one to inform and nothing to inform them about: such was life on earth, and above all human life, its memory, its inventions for communicating and remembering. Our organization can guarantee that this body of information not be lost, regardless of whether it is actually passed on to others or not. The duty of the director is to make sure nothing is left out, because what is left out is as if it had never been. At the same time it will also be your duty to treat any element that might end up causing confusion, or obscuring more essential elements, as if it had never been – everything, that is, that rather than increasing the body of information would generate pointless clutter and clatter. What matters is the general model constituted by the whole of our information, from which further information, which we are not giving or perhaps don’t have, may be deduced. In short, by not giving certain kinds of information, one is giving more than one would if one did. The final result of our work will be a model in which everything counts as information, even what isn’t there. Only then will it be possible to say what really mattered out of all that has been, or rather what really was, since the final state of our archive will constitute at once that which is, has been and will be, and all else is nothing.
Of course there are moments in our work – you will have experienced them too, Müller – when one is tempted to imagine that the only things that matter are those which elude our archives, that only what passes without leaving any trace truly exists, while everything held in our records is dead detritus, the leftovers, the waste. The moment comes when a yawn, a buzzing fly, an itch seem the only treasure there is, precisely because completely unusable, occurring once and for all and then completely forgotten, spare the monotonous destiny of being stored in the world memory. Who could rule out the possibility that the universe consists of the discontinuous network of moments that cannot be recorded, and that our organization does nothing but establish their negative image, a frame around emptiness and meaninglessness.
But the quirk of our profession is this: that as soon as we concentrate on something, we immediately want to include it in our files; with the result, I confess, that I have often found myself cataloguing yawns, pimples, unhelpful associations of ideas, little tunes I’ve whistled, and then hiding them amongst the mass of more useful information. For the position of director which you are about to be offered brings with it this privilege: the right to put ones personal imprints on the world memory. Please understand me, Müller: I am not talking about arbitrary liberties or an abuse of power, but of an indispensable element in our work. A mass of coldly objective and incontrovertible information would run the risk of presenting a far from truthful picture, of falsifying what is most specific in any situation. Suppose we received a message from another planet a message made up of pure facts, facts of such clarity as to be merely obvious: we wouldn’t pay attention, we would hardly even notice; only a message containing something unexpressed, something doubtful and partially indecipherable, would break through the threshold of our consciousness and demand to be received and interpreted. We must bear this in mind: the directors task is that of giving the whole of the data gathered and selected by our offices that slight subjective slant, that touch of the opinionated, the rash, which it needs in order to be true. That’s what I wanted to warn you about, before handing over: in the material gathered to date you will notice here and there the mark of my own hand – an extremely delicate one, you understand – a sprinkle of appraisals, of facts withheld, even lies.
Only in a superficial sense can lies be said to exclude the truth; you will be aware that in many cases – the patient’s lies to the psychoanalyst for example – are just as revealing as the truth, if not more so; and the same will be true for those who eventually interpret our message. What I’m telling you now Müller, I’m no longer telling you because instructed to do so by our superiors, but drawing on my own personal experience, speaking as colleague to colleague, man to man. Listen: the lie is the real information we have to pass on. Hence I didn’t wish to deny myself a discreet use of lying where it didn’t complicate the message, but on the contrary simplified it. When it came to information about myself in particular, I felt it legitimate to indulge in all kinds of details that are not true (I don’t see how this could bother anyone). My life with Angela, for example: I described it as I would have liked it to be, a great love story, where Angela and I appeared as two eternal lovebirds happy in the midst of every kind of adversity, passionate, faithful. It wasn’t exactly like that, Müller: Angela married me out of convenience and immediately regretted it, our life was one long trial of sourness and subterfuge. But what does it matter what happened day by day? In the world memory Angela’s image is definitive, perfect, nothing can taint it and I will be the most enviable husband there ever was.
At first all I had to do was to apply some cosmetics to the data our everyday life provided. But there came the point when the facts I found myself confronted with as I watched Angela day by day (then I spied on her, finally followed her) became increasingly contradictory and ambiguous, such as to justify the worst suspicions. What was I to do, Müller? Muddy that image of Angela at once so clear, so easy to transmit, so loved and loveable, was I to make it incomprehensible, to darken the most brilliant light in all our archives? I didn’t hesitate, day after day I eliminated these facts. But I was constantly afraid that some clue, some intimation, some hint from which one might deduce what she, what Angela did and was in this transitory life, might still be hovering around her definitive image. I spent the days in the laboratory, selecting, canceling, omitting. I was jealous, Müller: not jealous of the transitory Angela – that was a game I’d already lost – but jealous of that information-Angela who would live as long as the universe itself.
If the information-Angela was not to be contaminated, the first thing that must be done was to stop the living Angela from constantly superimposing herself on that image. It was then that Angela disappeared and all searches for her proved vain. It would be pointless, Müller, for me to tell you now how I managed to get rid of the body piece by piece. Please keep calm, these details are of no importance as far as our work is concerned, since in the world memory I remain that happy husband and later inconsolable widower you all know. But this didn’t bring peace of mind: the information-Angela was still part of an information system where certain data might lend themselves to being interpreted – whether because of disturbance in transmission, or some malevolence on the part of the decoder – as ambiguous conjectures, insinuations, slander. I decided to destroy all references to people Angela could have had relationships with. I was sad about that, since there will now be no trace of some of our colleagues in the world memory, it will be as though they had never existed.
You imagine that I am telling you all this in order to seek your complicity, Müller. But that’s not the case. I feel obliged to inform you of the extreme measures I am being forced to take to make sure that information relative to everybody who might have been my wife’s lover is excluded from the archives. I am not worried about any repercussions on myself; the few years that remain for me to live are a trifle compared to the eternity I am used to measuring this against; and the person I really was has already been definitively established and consigned to the punchcards.
If there is nothing that needs correcting in the world memory, the only thing left to do is to correct reality where it doesn’t agree with that memory. Just as I cancelled the existence of my wife’s lover from the punchcards, so I must cancel him from the world of the living. Which is why I am now pulling out my gun and pointing it at you, Müller, why I’m squeezing the trigger, killing you.

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