Sixteen Memos for the Next Millennium

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The exhibition takes its title from Italo Calvino’s ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium,’ a series of Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures he was invited to give at Harvard University over the course of the academic year between 1985-1986 regarding the literary values he identified as being of most importance for the coming millennium. He had intended to deliver eight lectures in total, but at the time of his departure to Massachusetts, he had written only five of them, which are teeming with references to stories of folklore, mythology, philosophical thought, etc. The sixth, his wife Esther Calvino revealed in the forward of the book, was planned to refer to Herman Melville’s story of ‘Bartleby,’ the scrivener who ‘preferred not to.’