As I wrote about last Wednesday, I’m a part of the Seeing Calvino art tumblr. Once again it’s my turn to illustrate a story from Calvino’s Cosmicomics, and this week the story is “All at One Point.” The story is set before the beginning of the universe, when all matter was concentrated in a single point. The narrator, Qfwfq, lived in that single point. The story begins, “Naturally, we were all there — old Qfwfq said — where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?”
But . . . how could you have people living inside a single point? And how can there be a sequence of events, if there’s no time? I understand your concern, friend, but you’re going to have to let go of that sort of thinking. Just read the story and it will, somehow, all make sense. And it has a surprisingly touching ending.
Like all the Cosmicomics stories, this one is a challenge to illustrate. Here’s an excerpt from what I came up with:
You can see the whole image at Seeing Calvino!
