In his 1988
essay «Lightness,» published in the compendium Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino likens the writer's creative act to an indirect gaze on the world; just as Perseus defeated Medusa by following her movement in the reflection of his shield, the strength of the literary imagination is in a writer's ability to wade through the opacity of our
literal world through the transformation of fact into fiction; subverting what Calvino describes as the «petrification» or «the weight» of
ideas through the lightness of mythology and its visionary language.