How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
It could be an important feature to be added to your portrait: your mind has interior walls that allow you to partition different times in which to stop or flow, to concentrate alternately on parallel channels. Is this enough to say you would like to live several lives simultaneously? (13.23)
First things first. Now, you're Ludmilla. You with us? Okay. While addressing you as Ludmilla, the book tries to figure out why you read so many books at the same time and why this is connected to your feelings of dissatisfaction. Maybe it's because real life is like reading Italo Calvino's book, and pleasure is always erased in the moment that it's about to be satisfied.
Quote #8
"At times it seems to me that the distance between my writing and her reading is unbridgeable, that whatever I write bears the stamp of artifice and incongruity" (15.5).
Silas Flannery stares through his stalker spyglass at a woman reading in a sun chair, and he becomes obsessed with the idea that the book she is reading is the book that he has always been supposed to write. Obviously, he suffers from terrible disappointment in his writing, and uses the woman as a fantasy to help him express this frustration. According to Calvino, the reality is that writing can only be a disappointing experience, since you can never write something that is perfect with words. As Calvino constantly reminds us, words are always incomplete in the way they create meaning; they always need to be interpreted by someone else, and you can't completely control what your words are going to communicate to someone. It's this exact sense of disappointment that keeps authors writing. If they wrote something perfect, there'd be no reason to continue.
Quote #9
"The romantic fascination produced in the pure state by the first sentences of the first chapter of many novels is soon lost in the continuation of the story: it is the promise of a time of reading that extends before us and can comprise all possible developments. I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object." (15.39)
Silas Flannery muses in his diary about the exact type of book Calvino has created for you in If on a winter's night a traveler. This passage comments on the general nature of desire in reading. After all, who hasn't thought of writing the perfect opening paragraph to a novel, only to be disappointed to discover that it's impossible to maintain this level of enthusiasm for an entire story?
The beginning of a novel is a promise of sorts, leading your mind toward all the things that could happen in the story. Unfortunately, then comes the continuation of the story, which develops on a line that becomes narrower and narrower as the plot unfolds. This is the nature of desire: the more it exists in a state of total potential, the more it is stimulated; the closer this potential gets to a feeling of satisfaction, the more difficult it is keep your initial enthusiasm.