Difficult Loves

by Italo Calvino

The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.

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.

Beyond the surface of the page you entered a world where life was more alive than here on this side: like the surface of the water that separates us from that blue-and-green world, rifts as far as the eye can see, expanses of fine, ribbed sand, creatures half animal and half vegetable.

ancient beauty is powerless against new ugliness.)