Sunday, January 22, 2017

Visibility by Italo Calvino

Throughout the reading, Calvino discusses the many ways we are able to imagine readings and descriptions of events that are handed to us. He talks about how imagination allows us to create pictures in our head of how we are perceiving the world around us. "O imagination, you who have the power to impose yourself on our faculties and our wills, stealing us away from the outer world and carrying us off into an inner one, so that even if a thousand trumpets were to sound we would not hear them..." (82). When thinking about imagination, I have never considered that it does in fact allow you to step away from the real world and see what you want to see. Imagination can be a cool concept in which everyone has their own version of how they want to see things. Another interesting factor he mentions is how there are two different types of an imaginative process: "...the one that starts with the word and arrives at the visual image, and the one that starts with the visual image and arrives at its verbal expression" (83). This also caught my attention because it is different when you are seeing something and then writing it down rather than when you are reading something and having to imagine it for yourself. Each is different in the sense that one is how you would describe the images in writing and the other would be how you perceive what is being given to you. Calvino posed scenarios that allowed me to realize how much goes into imagining that I had never thought of before.

4 comments:

  1. Katie, I found it interesting that you included a quote from the text regarding imagination’s power, and how it can steal us away from the outside world. I did not ever look at imagination in this sense as well, and agree that imagination allows one to step away from reality.


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  2. Your usage of the passages quotes to further your discussion is done very well. You make several good points that I also thought about while I was completing the reading. There are so many factors that contribute to one's imagination, it is hard to comprehend how expansive the concept is.

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  3. I like how you mentioned that imagination helps you step away from the real world. Coinciding with that, I also thought that the quotes that you used were very interesting

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  4. You made some really interesting points, Katie. Calvino’s point about the two different types of imaginative processes really resonated with me as well. I really liked description of this point as the difference between describing something in writing verses perceiving something in front of us is really interesting to me and is not how I initially thought of it.

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