If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

by Italo Calvino

a reader, only a reader, not an author,” you hasten to declare, like a man rushing to the aid of somebody about to make a misstep. “Oh, really? Good, good! I’m delighted!” And the glance he gives you really is a look of friendliness and gratitude. “I’m so pleased. I come across fewer and fewer readers. . . . ” He is overcome by a confidential urge: he lets himself be carried away; he forgets his other tasks; he takes you aside. “I’ve been working for years and years for this publisher . . . so many books pass through my hands . . . but can I say that I read? This isn’t what I call reading. . . . In my village there were few books, but I used to read, yes, in those days I did read. . . . I keep thinking that when I retire I’ll go back to my village and take up reading again, as before. Every now and then I set a book aside, I’ll read this when I retire, I tell myself, but then I think that it won’t be the same thing any more. . . . Last night I had a dream, I was in my village, in the chicken coop of our house, I was looking, looking for something in the chicken coop, in the basket where the hens lay their eggs, and what did I find? A book, one of the books I read when I was a boy, a cheap edition, the pages tattered, the black-and-white engravings all colored, by me, with crayons . . . You know? As a boy, in order to read, I would hide in the chicken coop. . . . ”