Lightness in a time of gravity

I've been looking over my notes on Italo Calvino's, Six Memos for the New Millenium. He loved words so much. He writes about the many uses of writing (Literature) but always comes back to this. What's most important about the use of words is "... as perpetual pursuit of things, as perpetual adjustment to their infinite variety...." He explains literature as "...an existential function, the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living." (26) He reminds me here, of Rilke's poem, the name of which I cannot call to mind, but the thrust of which is in lines I do remember. It's from The Book of Images and begins "You pale child...". In that poem he writes,

This is the crux of all that once existed:
that it does not remain with all its weight,
that to our being it returns instead,
woven into us, deep and magical.

These lines, written at the turn of the 20th century precurse Calvino's claim that the song/poem/play/story allows the memory and its related emotion to be revisited without its original, crushing weight. You might think of sorrow here, but it could also refer to the intensity of joy, which can no more (though we might wish it) remain in us as it did with its original weight/intensity than sorrow. We'd die of the weight of so much unrelieved emotion either way. This is why we have memory.

And this is why we have literature, to transmute gravity into lightness through language. To create what CAN be carried forward in the heart.

This is why I write.