ITALO CALVINO
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

ITALO CALVINO
If On a Winter's Night a Traveler

Sections in the bookstore:

• Books You Haven't Read
• Books You Needn't Read
• Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
• Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
• Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
• Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
• Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered
• Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
• Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
• Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
• Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages
• Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success
• Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment
• Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case
• Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer
• Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves
• Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
• Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read
• Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them

ITALO CALVINO
If on a WInter's Night a Traveler

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

ITALO CALVINO
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

ITALO CALVINO
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern?

Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment.

At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.

ITALO CALVINO
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time?

ITALO CALVINO
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

ITALO CALVINO
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

 

ITALO CALVINO
x

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

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One reads alone, even in another's presence.

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Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

Currently Reading

Italo Calvino
IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER

ITALO CALVINO
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. 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. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

ITALO CALVINO

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

____________________

I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? 

Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. 

The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.