Shrine of Whim

In his book 'Six Memos for the New Millenium', Calvino uses a myth as a metaphor in describing his lightness of writing within the context of a heaviness that the world presents to him in turn...

Calvino weaves into the victories of Perseus and how he defeats Medusa, whose head represents the realities of the world which so can drag us down. Calvino explains about Perseus: "his power derives from refusing to look directly while not denying the reality of the world of monsters in which he must live”. (Calvino, 1988, p. 6)

It would be interesting to know whether Nietzsche had read about the story of Perseus and Medusa in this light, because in 'Beyond Good and Evil', Nietzsche writes: “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby becomes a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” (Aphorism 146)

These two excerpts illustrate the very same thing in weight whilst Calvino gives us the lightness to go with Nietzsche's Aphorism.

The point is; we become what our mind focuses on. By focusing the mind on where we want to go, there we will go - and not in an automatic consequence of that being what we want. In the larger scheme of our reality, the mind's focus is the path we are threading, countless times until we do in actuality. Reality is tangibly and intangibly based on our consciousness.