Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [112]
That's what the great Edison said to me. The king of electricity was the only one who realized that I was doing something electricity could never do. No, being an expert doesn't count, what you've done doesn't count. It's what you can do and what you want to do that counts! The ideas you have for the future!
SPOKESMAN: Today your future is already the past… and it conditions the present for everyone… Tell me, when you look around today, do you see the future you wanted? I mean the future you saw when you started, when you were a young country boy in Michigan, shutting yourself away in your father's farm shed, trying out different cylinders and pistons and transmission belts and differential gears … Tell me, Mr Ford, do you remember what you wanted then?
HENRY FORD: Yes, I wanted lightness, a light engine for a light vehicle, like the small gig I kept trying to fix up with a steam boiler… I've always looked for lightness, reducing the waste of materials and effort…. I spent my days shut up in the garage workshop … From outside I caught the smell of hay… the whisde of the thrush from the old elm near the pond… a butterfly came in through the window, drawn to the glow of the boiler, it beat its wings around it, then the thump of the piston sent it flying away, silent, light…
Images of slow heavy traffic in a big city, of trucks in a jam on the highway, of work at a steel mill press, work at an assembly line, of smoke from smoke stacks, etc., are superimposed over the figure of Henry Ford as he speaks these last lines)
The Last Channel
My thumb presses down independently of any act of will: moment by moment, but at irregular intervals, I feel the need to push, to press, to set off an impulse sudden as a bullet; if this is what they meant when they granted me partial insanity, they were right But they are wrong if they imagine there was no plan, no clearly thought-out intention behind what I did. Only now, in the padded and enamelled calm of this small hospital room, can I deny the incongruous behaviour I had to hear attributed to me at the trial, as much by the defence as the prosecution. With this report which I hope to send to the appeal court magistrates, though my defence lawyers are absolutely determined to prevent me, I intend to re-establish the truth, the only truth, my own, if anyone is capable of understanding it.
The doctors are in the dark too, groping about, but at least they were positive about my desire to write something down and gave me this typewriter and this ream of paper: they think this development indicates an improvement due to my being shut up in a room without a television and they attribute the disappearance of the spasm that used to contract my hand to my being deprived of the small object I was holding when I was arrested and that I managed (the convulsions I threatened every time they grabbed it from me were not simulated) to keep with me throughout my detention, interrogation and trial. (How, if not by demonstrating that the corpus delicti had become a part of my corpus, could I have explained what I had done and - though I didn't manage to convince them - why I had done it?)
The first mistake they made in their diagnosis was to suppose that my attention span is so short that I cannot follow a coherent succession of images for more than a few minutes, that my mind can only capture fragments of stories and arguments without a beginning or an end, in short that the connecting thread that holds the fabric of the world together had snapped in my head. It's not true, and the proof they brought forward to support their thesis — the way I sit motionless in front of the TV for hours and hours without following a programme, obliged