by Italo Calvino
Numbers in the Dark (1995)
* * * * (Great) Fable
There was a town in which everyone was a thief. In this town, from next-door neighbor to government official, everyone stole from one another. And then an honest man arrived.
They say man is an animal at heart, naturally evil. This story presents a bleak, but entirely logical, lesson about the nature of man and his tendencies. It presents a utopia formed from universal thieving. In the story’s scant two pages, this utopia is challenged, and we are forced to question our own ideals. I quite enjoyed it. I suppose that has to do with my own cynical tendencies, but I digress. What I found most fascinating were the progressively logical sentences, for example:
“So everybody lived happily together, nobody lost out, since each stole from the other, and that other from another gain, and so on and on until you got to a last person who stole from the first.”Everyone is equal. (And now I wonder: Was Calvino a Socialist? I hate to think this deeply.)
Thanks, Google. Calvino was a Communist, and his father a Socialist.
ReplyDeleteI actually learned something, and it had to do with politics, and I remembered it - recognized it - in a story I read? Go me.