I had hoped to read the whole book of Italo Calvino short stories. My best friend has talked about him for a while, but I hadn't been pushed into reading some of his stuff before this. I didn't read the two selections from class because I wanted to start at the beginning and read the whole thing, but everything seems to be taking me three times longer than I thought it would.
I only got to this one story by I loved it and want to continue with more. I've also gotten about halfway though "At Daybreak."
The characters go out in a boat and use a tall ladder to reach the low Moon. All the people go out to gather moon milk. At some point between the Earth and the moon the gravitational pulls shift, and one has to fight gravity with their weight to move between the two. The narrator goes out with his family, the boat captain, and the captain's wife. At one point his little niece is trapped in the air between the two but little sea creatures attach to her until she is heavy enough to fall back to Earth into the ocean. His blind cousin has the most romantic relationship with the moon navigating the surface easily and instinctually knowing where and how to procure the milk with ease. The narrator is in love with the boat captain's wife, however she loves the blind cousin.
I really felt the love and ironic tragedy in the story. It is heart breaking how each one in this triangle so deeply loves another:
The cousin so loved the moon that "he was unable to conceive desires that went against the Moon's nature, the Moon's course and destiny, and if the Moon now tended to go away from him, then he would take delight in this separation just as, till now, he had delighted in the Moon's nearness."
"If what my cousin now loved was the distant Moon, then [the boat captain's wife] too would remain distant, on the Moon."
"I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them."
The premise of the story reminded me of the short Pixar film "La Luna." I can't imagine that the creators weren't inspired by or at least aware of "The Distance of the Moon." It takes the premise of using a boat and a ladder to reach the moon very differently, but the magic of it still gives me warm fuzzies like Calvino's original story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luixBGiC83M
I only got to this one story by I loved it and want to continue with more. I've also gotten about halfway though "At Daybreak."
The characters go out in a boat and use a tall ladder to reach the low Moon. All the people go out to gather moon milk. At some point between the Earth and the moon the gravitational pulls shift, and one has to fight gravity with their weight to move between the two. The narrator goes out with his family, the boat captain, and the captain's wife. At one point his little niece is trapped in the air between the two but little sea creatures attach to her until she is heavy enough to fall back to Earth into the ocean. His blind cousin has the most romantic relationship with the moon navigating the surface easily and instinctually knowing where and how to procure the milk with ease. The narrator is in love with the boat captain's wife, however she loves the blind cousin.
I really felt the love and ironic tragedy in the story. It is heart breaking how each one in this triangle so deeply loves another:
The cousin so loved the moon that "he was unable to conceive desires that went against the Moon's nature, the Moon's course and destiny, and if the Moon now tended to go away from him, then he would take delight in this separation just as, till now, he had delighted in the Moon's nearness."
"If what my cousin now loved was the distant Moon, then [the boat captain's wife] too would remain distant, on the Moon."
"I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them."
The premise of the story reminded me of the short Pixar film "La Luna." I can't imagine that the creators weren't inspired by or at least aware of "The Distance of the Moon." It takes the premise of using a boat and a ladder to reach the moon very differently, but the magic of it still gives me warm fuzzies like Calvino's original story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luixBGiC83M
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