I want to think with writers who, as Italo Calvino writes marvelously in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, produce books as a pumpkin vine grows pumpkins; fruit for fruit’s sake, not for the sake of whatever moral preserve or pedagogical jelly might be made of it. And I want to read as though eating whatever grows on those vines—an operation that is at once thoughtful and sensory, absorbing thought with one’s whole body. Sometimes it is nutritious. Sometimes it is poisonous. Sometimes—surprisingly often—it is both.
