“Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.” This incantation, at the beginning of the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter in James Joyce’s Ulysses, describes babies being born at a Dublin maternity hospital on a June day in 1904. In epic terms, the sentence relates to an island in Homer’s Odyssey populated by cattle that are the special horned creatures of the sun god, Helios. In Biblical terms, it enacts the process of words made flesh. The brightness of holy incandescence at the chant’s beginning is transformed into human life by the end. Light is made material before our eyes.

English is unusual in offering the same word, light, to refer to both illumination and a slightness of weight. In French, the concepts have their own, distinct words: lumière and légèreté. In Italian, they’re luce and leggerezza; in German, licht and leichtigkeit. Yet 17 years before Ulysses was published, Einstein demonstrated that the bright stuff that pours from the heavens has substance, that light is both a wave and a particle, a flash and a thing. In their own ways, Einstein and Joyce ushered in a modern era that was fixated on the magical conjuring, dislocation, and evaporation of matter. English had it right when it extended “light” across states of being.

We’re still in that era in every facet of culture, not least design. In a recent stroke of synchronicity, lightness was the theme of both the 49th Museum of Modern Art R&D Salon, held in New York City this past June, and of the sixth Lake Como Design Festival, hosted in Italy last month. True to the diffuse subject, both events took a large part of their inspiration not from a designer or architect, but from Italo Calvino, the Italian postmodern novelist and critic.

In his “Six Memos for the Next Millennium,” a Harvard lecture series that Calvino didn’t live long enough to complete, much less deliver (he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1985, at the age of 61), he proposed half a dozen literary values he believed would resonate powerfully in the future. The first was lightness, a quality that allowed the writer’s imagination to skitter among observations, sensations, and the textual creations of others, weaving together a reality that was no less legitimate than the grounded discoveries of science. (After all, what is solid matter but an illusion? Even the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus understood that the hardest, heaviest substances were composed of atoms flying around in space.)

There is slipperiness in the dichotomy of lightness and weight, Calvino stressed, nodding to Milan Kundera’s cult novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which had been published the year before he passed. What is weighty is not just a drag, but also profound and durable. What is light is not just magical, but also flippant and evanescent. And these polarities are not just unstable on their own terms, but illuminate and complicate each other.

“If I had to choose an auspicious sign for the approach of the new millennium,” Calvino wrote, “I would choose this: the sudden nimble leap of the poet/philosopher who lifts himself against the weight of the world, proving that its heaviness contains the secret of lightness, while what many believe to be the life force of the times—loud and aggressive, roaring and rumbling—belongs to the realm of death, like the graveyard of automobiles.”

Now that we are squarely in the millennium that Calvino could only squint at, subjected to the rigid dogmas of our political climate, the restless metaphors of lightness and weight are hardly comforting for those who cannot tolerate ambiguity. This may be why the question of what it means—and what it’s worth—to be “light” is so alluring to designers, scientists, and thinkers unwilling to accept the complacency of so-called progress.

Lightness is “the image of grace, agility, luminosity, the essence of buoyant clouds and billowing silks,” declared the text introduction to MoMA R&D Salon 49, part of an IRL event series organized and hosted by Paola Antonelli, the museum’s longtime senior design curator. “It is good for the spirit and good for the environment. In theory, the lighter an object is, the less energy it consumes during its existence and the lighter its impact is. Nonetheless”—and here comes the always-lurking paradox—“even apparently immaterial things carry a burden, at times a heavy one. The internet’s illusion of weightlessness—human activities, objects, and interactions dissolving into bits and traveling through the air—crashes when confronted by the heavy ecological footprint necessary to sustain its infrastructure.”

What followed at the Salon was a stream of not just dialectical contradictions but violent reversals: How Kanye West clawed away huge portions of his Malibu beach house built by the minimalist master Tadao Ando to reach some deranged concept of architectural purity. How an Apple advertisement dramatized the crushing of tools and technologies representing every facet of analog culture to create the chilly sliver of the company’s new iPad. How tents, the portable shelters of nomads, those paragons of resourceful living in harmony with the earth, have devolved into symbols of homelessness and urban shame. How fleshiness, once a signifier of prosperity, flipped into a malign feature that helped justify the enslavement of African women and remains a stigma in the age of Ozempic.

A media studies professor, a philosopher of Buddhism, an engineer working with origami, an aerospace architect, and others rotated the concept of lightness in culture like a gem held up to a lamp among shadows. Their presentations sparkled with complexity and sometimes even optimism.

Four thousand miles away and less than three months later, the Lake Como Design Festival described its theme of lightness as “a constant need over time that has always pushed us toward the illusion that we can ignore the force of gravity and get closer to the sky.” This was not presented as a bad thing. Today, lightness means “finding the right balance between form, material, and movement,” the festival literature proclaimed. Yet here, too, lightness, by its unstable nature, was all over the map.

Organized by the nonprofit cultural organization Wonderlake Como, the festival was headquartered in a 16-acre hillside park, on which sat a 17th-century villa and a number of outbuildings: tool sheds, greenhouses, a tiny chapel. All but the recently renovated Villa del Grumello were in poetic states of semi-moldering, casting a Sleeping Beauty spell on works by international designers and artists—delicate mobiles and woven tapestries, architectural models made of melted wax, rippling glass that engineered the fluid patterns of reflected beams—objects that pushed the elastic semantics of their theme, so that lightness was also interpreted as levity. And nothing made visitors more conscious of lightness than the tug of gravity exerted on their bodies as they climbed the Chilometro della Conoscenza, the lush, steep path between sites.

In repurposed civic and religious buildings closer to the city center, an antique gravitas made the exhibited objects seem more ethereal. At San Pietro in Atrio, a church dating from the 12th century, artists’ prints representing ideas of buoyancy and flight were displayed along with their engraved plates, showing how material had been scratched away to produce legible tracks of the imagination.

Writing about this show, called “Lightness on Paper,” the critic Maria Cristina Didero quoted Calvino’s belief that lightness “is related to precision and definition, not to the hazy and haphazard.” This, too, seemed paradoxical considering all that is wavering and protean about lightness and its metaphors. But Calvino immediately cut through the contradiction by echoing a line by the French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry: “One must be light like the bird, not like the feather.”

The complex anatomical and conceptual forces that propel us to defy gravity and “get closer to the sky” are different from aimless, thoughtless propulsion. Design, as has often been said, is intention. It has contours. It is controlled by instincts that lead in the opposite direction from chaos. In these troubled times, the feeling that dark matters are relentlessly dragging us toward a collective abyss can be conquered, today’s maestros of lightness tell us, so long as we resolutely aim for something higher.