“I would like this to signal the end of ‘wasted angst’ in my life.”
What does it mean to live well, live fully? For most of us, it’s an intricate balancing act that involves enough ambition to grow and enough equanimity to keep ourselves from worrying all the time, about everything. The latter is a mental fallibility especially detrimental amidst a culture entranced by constant worries about productivity and unable to find refuge inpresence.
In a beautiful January 1950 letter to his friend Mario Motta, found in Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 (public library) — one of the best biographies and memoirs of 2013, which also gave us Calvino’s advice on writing, his prescient meditation on abortion and the meaning of life, his poetic resume, and his thoughts on America — the 26-year-old aspiring writer lays out this wonderfully timeless and universally resonant resolution for a better, more present and worry-free life:
I would like this to signal the end of “wasted angst” in my life: I’ve never regretted anything so much as having particular individual worries, in a certain sense anachronistic ones, whereas general worries, worries about our time (or at any rate those that can be reduced to such: like your problem in paying the rent, for instance) are so many and so vast and so much “my own” that I feel they are enough to fill all my “worryability” and even my interest and enjoyment in living. So from now on I want to dedicate myself entirely to these latter (worries) — but I am already aware of the traps in this question and that’s why for some time now my first need has been to “de-journalistize” myself, to get myself out of the stranglehold that has dominated these last few years of my life, reading books to review immediately, commenting on something even before having to time to form an opinion on it. I want to build a new kind of daily program for myself where I can finally get into something, something definitive (within the limits of historical possibility), something not dishonest or insincere (unlike the way today’s journalist always behaves, more or less). For that reason I make several plans for myself: … to maintain my contacts with reality and the world, but being careful, of course, not to get lost in unnecessary activities; and also to set up my own individual work not as a “journalist” any more but as a “scholar,” with systematic readings, notes, comments, notebooks, a load of things I’ve never done; and also, eventually, to write a novel.
That year, Calvino focused his efforts on The Cloven Viscount, which was published in 1952 — a fantasy novel Calvino remarked in another letter was “written to give [his] imagination a holiday after punishing it” with the ill-fated unpublished book that preceded it.
Complement Calvino’s meditation with this fantastic 1934 guide to the art of not worrying and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter to his daughter about what to worry vs. not worry about in life, then revisit other famous New Year’s resolutions fromJonathan Swift, Susan Sontag, Marilyn Monroe, and Woody Guthrie.
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