Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [114]
So they thought up another theory, capable of bringing me back to my right mind again, they say; or rather, they claim that I convinced myself of this theory on my own and that this constituted the unconscious brake that stopped me committing the criminal acts they thought me ready to commit. This is the theory according to which for all my changing channels the programme is always the same or might as well be; whether they're transmitting a film or news or ads there is only one message whatever the station since everything and everybody are part of the one system; and likewise outside the screen, the system invades everything leaving space only for apparent changes; so that whether I go wild with my remote control or whether I keep my hands in my pocket makes no difference, because I'll never be able to get out of the system. I don't know whether those who put forward these ideas believe in them or whether they only say them in an attempt to draw me into the discussion; in any event they never had any hold on me because they cannot shake my conviction as to the essence of things. As I see it what counts in the world are not likenesses but differences: differences that may be big or then again small, or minute, perhaps even imperceptible, but what matters is precisely to tease them out and compare them. I know myself that in going from channel to channel you get the impression that it's all the same old story; and likewise I know that life is governed by necessities that prevent it from varying more than a certain amount: but it is in that small difference that the secret lies, the spark that sets in motion the machine of consequences, as a result of which the differences become considerable, large, huge, even infinite. I look at the things around me, all awry, and I think how the tiniest trifle would have been enough - a mistake not made at a certain moment, a yes instead of a no - to have generated entirely different consequences, albeit leaving the general shape of circumstances intact. Things so simple and natural diat I was always expecting them to reveal themselves at any moment: thinking this and pressing the buttons on the remote control was one and the same thing.
With Volumnia I thought Fd finally hit on the right channel. Indeed in the early days of our relationship, I gave the remote control a rest. I liked everything about her, the tobacco-coloured chignon hairstyle, the almost contralto voice, the knickerbockers and pointed boots, our shared passion for bulldogs and cactuses. Equally congenial, I felt, were her parents, the places where they had invested in real estate and where we spent invigorating vacations, and the insurance company in which Volumnia's father had promised me a creative job with profit-sharing after we were married. All doubts, objections, and conjectures that did not converge in the desired direction I sought to banish from my mind, but when I saw how they kept coming back more and more insistendy, I began to wonder whether the small cracks, the misunderstandings, the embarrassments that had so far seemed no more than momentary and marginal eclipses might not be interpreted as ill omens for our future prospects, that is that our happiness might contain within it that sense of contrivance and tedium you find in a bad TV serial. Yet I never lost my conviction that Volumnia and I were made for each other: