What We Bring to the Shuffle

Calvino wrote this in his lecture on “Multiplicity,” one of the posthumously published Six Memos for the Next Millennium, prepared for Harvard shortly before his death in 1985. He couldn’t have anticipated generative AI, but the words land now with uncanny resonance. A “combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined” could describe a person. It could also describe a system trained on the full corpus of human expression. The resemblance is close enough to be unsettling.

And yet something in the passage resists easy equivalence. Calvino doesn’t just say we are made of information. He says we are made of experiences, of things imagined. There’s agency threaded through that list, a suggestion that the combinatoria is shaped by the particular contours of a life: by what we lingered on, what bored us, what woke us at three in the morning. The library is curated by a body moving through time, one that forgets as readily as it remembers, and whose forgetting matters as much as its recall.

What’s quietly radical is that Calvino makes no claim to originality in the Romantic sense. He doesn’t position the artist as an ex nihilo creator, sparking something from nothing. We are composed, he says, of influences, borrowed styles, absorbed information. And he seems to find this cause for wonder: “everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.” The creative act, for Calvino, lives in the shuffling. The same deck of cards, dealt by a different hand, produces a different game.

All of which is worth sitting with when the question of what makes our work “ours” feels especially fragile. Perhaps what we bring to the combinatoria is the specific gravity of having lived a life among our influences: the weight of preference, the pull of obsession, the irreplicable fact of caring about this particular combination and not that one.