Nonconformity: The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
What can we learn from a fable about an eighteenth-century nobleman never touching the ground again after his childhood? Become a paid subscriber for book-related posts like this one.
A 12-year-old has a spat with his aristocratic parents, climbs a tree, and refuses to come down – for 53 years. This sounds like an absurdly long, childish tantrum, but in the 1957 novel The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, a boy’s rebellious “I won’t!” turns into a life of imaginative, blissful eccentricity. Swinging from tree to tree in a lush forest at the edge of his hometown, sleeping in the canopy and interacting from the lower branches with friends, neighbors and animals on the ground, Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò creates a unique, surprising existence.
His lifestyle balances solitude and independence with participation in some aspects of society completely on his own terms. Apart from the physical challenges and discomforts, we might thus consider Cosimo’s lifestyle a fascinating model for introverts.