Italo Calvino was born on this date in 1923.
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, from If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
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