Difficult Loves

by Italo Calvino

The minute you start saying something—‘Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!’—you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity, the second to madness.”

The taste for the spontaneous, natural, lifelike snapshot kills spontaneity, drives away the present.

He put the token in the slot, dialed the number, listened with beating heart to the distant ring, heard Cinzia’s “Hello” still suffused with sleep and soft warmth, and he was already in the tension of their days together, in the desperate battle against the hours; and he realized he would never manage to tell her anything of the significance of that night, which he now sensed was fading, like every perfect night of love, at the cruel explosion of day.

Of course, the price to pay is high, but we have to accept it: not to be able to distinguish ourselves from the many signals that pass along this road, each with a meaning of its own that remains hidden and indecipherable, because there is no longer anyone outside of here who is able to receive us and understand us.

Now her voice was becoming tender, affectionate: this was the moment that—without even confessing it to myself—I had been waiting for, because it was only in moments of amorous abandon that everything separating us disappeared and we discovered we were just two people, and it didn’t matter who we were.

There are those who condemn themselves to the most gray, mediocre life because they have suffered some grief, some misfortune; but there are also those who do the same thing because their good fortune is greater than they feel they can sustain.

it’s easy enough to strike up an acquaintance, but then you’re involved; somebody says, “What’s on this evening?” and you end up all together watching television or going to the movies, and after that evening you’re caught up in a group of people who mean nothing to you, and you have to tell them your business and listen to theirs.