Works and Days

“What Ulysses saves from the power of the lotus, from Circe’s drugs, and from the Siren’s song, is not just the past or the future. Memory truly counts–for an individual, a society, a culture–only if it holds together the imprint of the past and the plan for the future, if it allows one to do things without forgetting what one wanted to do, and to become without ceasing to be, to be without ceasing to become.”

Italo Calvino (Corriere della serra, 10 August 1975)

This state can only be represented in symbol; but the symbol of
inversion is true in another way.  If a man saw the world upside down,
with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool,
one effect would be to emphasise the idea of dependence.
There is a Latin and literal connection; for the very word dependence
only means hanging.  It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says
that God has hung the world upon nothing.  If St. Francis had seen,
in one of his strange dreams, the town of Assisi upside down,
it need not have differed in a single detail from itself except
in being entirely the other way round.  But the point is this:
that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry of its walls or
the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel would
make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was turned over
the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and more in peril.
It is but a symbol; but it happens to fit the psychological fact.
St. Francis might love his little town as much as before, or more
than before; but the nature of the love would be altered even
in being increased.  He might see and love every tile on the steep
roofs or every bird on the battlements; but he would see them
all in a new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence.
Instead of being merely proud of his strong city because it could
not be moved, he would be thankful to God Almighty that it had not
been dropped; he would be thankful to God for not dropping the whole
cosmos like a vast crystal to be shattered into falling stars.
Perhaps St. Peter saw the world so, when he was crucified head-downwards.

Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi