A magazine asks me to write a short piece in response to Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium, a series of texts Calvino wrote in the 1980s about the qualities he believes are unique to literature and which will carry us through the next millennium. My assignment is to write about his first memo on “Lightness,” in which he says you can’t write about this heavy world with a heavy hand; you have to treat the gnarly stuff with delicacy and wit.