As the title suggests, my point of departure -- my beginning -- is Italo Calvino's last memo for the next millennium, left unfinished -- and thus open to conjecture and interpretation -- by the sudden and untimely death of its author, in the summer of 1985. Yet, this is not (simply) an essay on Calvino's last memo or on his six memos in general, often read as a sort of prophetic last will and testament.

In an outline found among Calvino's papers and dated 23.2.85, Cominciare e finire ("Beginning and Ending") appears as the first title of the six Norton lectures that he was supposed to deliver at Harvard in September. Another of the many outlines sketched by Calvino, dating from the beginning of April, lists the slightly modified title: "The art of beginning and the art of concluding" as the sixth and last lecture of the series. Later in June, the outline of the lectures begins to resemble what we have come to consider their definitive order: Lightness,Quickness,Exactitude, etc. In the last two outlines all traces of Beginning and Ending have disappeared. Lightness is consistently listed as the first lecture. The last, the unfinished one we have come to know as Consistency, is listed instead, in the outline of June 22, under the title Openness.
Basing himself on the examination of the five Norton notebooks and various references and marginal notes left by Calvino, the editor of Calvino's works, Mario Barenghi, comes up with this conjecture: the content of "Beginning and Ending," presumably abridged, would have served as an introduction to the new, concluding theme of Consistency, which would have also included some fragmentary ideas about Openness (referred to by Calvino in his marginal notes, under the rubrics "sense of connection" and "disconnection"), in addition to various references to three books: Franz Kafka's Amerika, Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield and Hermann Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener.
The missing lecture, concludes Barenghi, would have likely addressed the connection between "intersubjectivity" and "solipsism," thus perhaps allowing Calvino to talk about himself without making concessions to psychology and autobiography, categories he always preferred to avoid.

Rather than conjecturing about the content of the missing memo, or the compositional order of the series, in my essay I focus on the two contradictory ideas that would seemingly have been intertwined in that never-completed and never delivered first-last lecture: Openness-Consistency, as an approximation of what, for lack of better definition, I will call the cognitive loop in the age of hyper narratives.

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