If on a winter’s night a traveler – Italo Calvino
“I am looking for Mr. Kauderer,” I said to him. He answered, “Mr. Kauderer is not here. But since the cemetery is the home of those who are not here, come in.”
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It’s a story that sooner or later I’ll also end up telling, but in the midst of all the others, not giving more importance to one than to another, not putting any special passion into it beyond the pleasure of narrating and remembering, because even remembering evil can be a pleasure when the evil is mixed I won’t say with good, but with variety, the volatile, the changeable, in other words with what I can also call good, which is the pleasure of seeing things from a distance and narrating them as what is past.
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I read in a book that the objectivity of thought can be expressed using the verb “to think” in the impersonal third person: saying not “I think” but “it thinks” as we say “it rains.” There is thought in the universe—this is the constant from which we must set out every time.
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“My case is different. I’m an infiltrator, a real revolutionary infiltrated into the ranks of the false revolutionaries. But to avoid being discovered, I have to pretend to be a counterrevolutionary infiltrated among the true revolutionaries. And, in fact, I am, inasmuch as I take orders from the police; but not from the real ones, because I report to the revolutionaries infiltrated among the counterrevolutionary infiltrators.”
“If I understand correctly, here everybody has infiltrated: in the police and in the revolution. But how can you tell one from the other?”
“With each person you have to discover who are the infiltrators that had him infiltrate. And even before that, you have to know who infiltrated the infiltrators.”
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[…] radiant vision that rises from the disenchanted words […]
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“In my case, too, all the books I read are leading to a single book,” a fifth reader says, sticking his face out from behind a pile of bound volumes, “but it is a book remote in time, which barely surfaces from my memories. There is a story that for me comes before all other stories and of which all the stories I read seem to carry an echo, immediately lost. In my readings I do nothing but seek that book read in my childhood, but what I remember of it is too little to enable me to find it again.”
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“If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave—What story down there awaits its end?—he asks, anxious to hear the story.”
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The seventh reader interrupts you: “Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”