Climbing a ladder to the moon

As faithful readers of this column will know, a little while ago someone posted a comment that I should read Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. Conveniently, this same person had once sent her brother a copy of the book, and since I live with her brother, the book was already on my bookshelf. And I'm very happy she did, because I loved the book. I was maybe particularly primed to like it because, also as previously mentioned in this blog, I like reading pop science and over the years have built up some knowledge of physics and astronomy, the little my mathematically-limited head will allow. Not that this book requires an independent interest in science. It looks at its subject - events in cosmogony, physics and early biology - in a completely poetic way.

The beauty of Cosmicomics is that it takes some concepts that are incredibly counterintuitive, like the Big Bang, or the curvature of space, and tells you about them in a very intuitive, kind of traditional, narrative way, from the perspective of someone who was there at the time (our narrator is old Qfwfq, who has managed to be present at many opportune moments in the history of the universe, even some mutually incompatible ones, which only shows some of his talents). Many writers make use of scientific concepts for literary ends, especially, I've found, quantum theory - like that terrible book I gave up on in my last post, and the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, but also some really good things, like the play Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. Cosmicomics is like none of those. It inhabits the beginning of the universe, the creation of the galaxies, the "fluid, shapeless nebula" that will later become the planets of the solar system, and gives you ways to think about concepts you've probably been told of before but were never able to square with your human perception of physics.

Each chapter begins with the statement of a scientific theory, and then moves into Qfwfq's telling of what it was like. The first chapter is a totally beautiful story about a group who rows their boat out to the moon at a time when the moon is close enough to the earth that you can get onto it by jumping off the top of a long ladder (the moon's gravitational force helps you at that last stage). Some of the chapters reminded me of Kipling's Just So Stories, for instance the one about the Big Bang where everyone present was occupying a single point in space until a woman several of them were in love with said she would make them some noodles if only she had some more room to roll out the dough. Some of the chapters also reminded me of the first two chapters of Genesis and of other creation myths, especially one in which Qfwfq and a friend are playing a game of marbles which turns, quite naturally, into a game of creating galaxies.

I was less captivated by the chapters about the dinosaur and the mollusk. It's a much more usual kind of thing, the literary anthropomorphism of animals. But the literary anthropomorphism of primordial goop requires a much rarer imagination and writing talent. That isn't to say that I didn't like those chapters. The entire book, quite aside from being an impressive feat, is beautiful and magical and light and airy and a really fun read.