If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

by Italo Calvino

the position of the feet during reading is of maximum importance,

for the moment my external behavior is that of a traveler who has missed a connection,

You are the sort of reader who is sensitive to such refinements; you are quick to catch the author’s intentions and nothing escapes you.

The thing that most exasperates you is to find yourself at the mercy of the fortuitous,

Your reading is no longer solitary: you think of the Other Reader,

How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes,

“The book I would like to read now

the historical story along with the individual’s story, a novel that gives the sense of living through an upheaval that still has no name, has not yet taken shape….”

as if he expects pleasure only from submission to her whim.

And so if by chance I happen to dwell on some ordinary detail of an ordinary day, the visit of a Singhalese who wants to sell me a litter of newborn crocodiles in a zinc tub, I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode there is implicit everything I have experienced, all the past, the multiple pasts I have tried in vain to leave behind me,

The old Indian, according to some, is the universal source of narrative material,

a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow.

We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models:

Your relationship with objects is selective, personal; only the things you feel yours become yours:

Are you depressive or euphoric? The house, in its wisdom, seems to have taken advantage of your moments of euphoria to prepare itself to shelter you in your moments of depression.

That in every experience you take for granted a dissatisfaction that can be redeemed only in the sum of all dissatisfactions?

So the moment has come to address you in the second person plural, a very serious operation, because it is tantamount to considering the two of you a single subject.

A tension concentrated on not losing anything of its own potential, on prolonging a state of reactivity, on exploiting the accumulation of the other’s desire in order to multiply one’s own charge?

In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn’t change a thing.

Ludmilla, now you are being read.

What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

Since I have become a slave laborer of writing, the pleasure of reading has finished for me.

the book should be simply the equivalent of the unwritten world translated into writing.

its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written,

I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that

He went on expounding to me his theories, according to which the author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of his fictions.

You realize that it takes considerable heedlessness to entrust yourself to unsure instruments, handled with approximation; or perhaps this demonstrates an invincible tendency to passivity, to regression, to infantile dependence. (But are you reflecting on the air journey or on reading?)

If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it.