I have always loved this ending to Calvino’s Invisible Cities:
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
In the past I have interpreted this in the most abstract sense; applied to everything from the Great Khan’s fear of future infernal cities to the struggles of living in this world. But I returned to this passage after finishing The Jungle and, primed as I was with the rhetoric of righteous struggle which concludes that text, I was struck by Calvino’s call to arms against the forces of inferno. The words became an indictment of the colonialism that is at the foundation of the novel; the Great Khan and his empire. We can accept the forces of the inferno or we can seek out its antagonists, like the energized Socialists whose words fill up the last thirty pages of Upton Sinclair’s novel. On the inside cover of The Jungle is a short biography of Upton Sinclair which ends with this quote:
My efforts are to find out what is righteousness in the world, to live it, and try to help others to live it.
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1974. 165
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Bantam Books, 1981. Originally publ. 1906.
