Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [58]
What will the human race be at the moment of its extinction? A certain quantity of information about itself and the world, a finite quantity, given that it will no longer be able to propagate itself and grow. For a certain time, the universe enjoyed an excellent opportunity to gather and elaborate information; and to create it, to bring forth information there where in other circumstances there would have been no one to inform and nothing to inform them about: such was life on earth, and above all human life, its memory, its inventions for communicating and remembering. Our organization can guarantee that this body of information not be lost, regardless of whether it is actually passed on to others or not. The duty of the director is to make sure that nothing is left out, because what is left out is as if it had never been. At the same time it will also be your duty to treat any element that might end up causing confusion, or obscuring more essential elements, as if it had never been - everything, that is, that rather than increasing the body of information would generate pointless clutter and clatter. What matters is the general model constituted by the whole of our information, from which further information, which we are not giving or perhaps don't have, may be deduced. In short, by not giving certain kinds of information, one is giving more than one would if one did. The final result of our work will be a model in which everything counts as information, even what isn't there. Only then will it be possible to say what really mattered out of all that has been, or rather what really was, since the final state of our archive will constitute at once that which is, has been and will be, and all else is nothing.
Of course there are moments in our work - you will have experienced them too, Muller - when one is tempted to imagine that the only things that matter are those which elude our archives, that only what passes without leaving any trace truly exists, while everything held in our records is dead detritus, the left-overs, the waste. The moment comes when a yawn, a buzzing fly, an itch seem the only treasure there is, precisely because completely unusable, occurring once and for all and then promptly forgotten, spared the monotonous destiny of being stored in the world memory. Who could rule out the possibility that the universe consists of the discontinuous network of moments that cannot be recorded, and that our organization does nothing but establish their negative image, a frame around emptiness and meaninglessness.
But the quirk of our profession is this: that as soon as we concentrate on something, we immediately want to include it in our files; with the result, I confess, that I have often found myself cataloguing yawns, pimples, unhelpful associations of ideas, little tunes I've whistled, and then hiding them amongst the mass of more useful information. For the position of director which you are about to be offered brings with it this privilege: the right to put one's personal imprint on the world memory. Please understand me, Muller: I'm not talking about arbitrary liberties or an abuse of power, but of an indispensable element in our work. A mass of coldly objective and incontrovertible information would run the risk of presenting a far from truthful picture, of falsifying what is most specific in any situation. Suppose we received from another planet a message made up of pure facts, facts of such clarity as to be merely obvious: we wouldn't pay attention, we would hardly even notice; only a message containing something unexpressed, something doubtful and partially indecipherable, would break through the threshold of our consciousness and