If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Calvino Italo

Author:Calvino, Italo [Calvino, Italo]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-09-17T01:54:13+00:00

In a network of lines that enlace

The first sensation this book should convey is what I feel when I hear the telephone ring; I say "should" because I doubt that written words can give even a partial idea of it: it is not enough to declare that my reaction is one of refusal, of flight from this aggressive and threatening summons, as it is also a feeling of urgency, intolerableness, coercion that impels me to obey the injunction of that sound, rushing to answer even though I am certain that nothing will come of it save suffering and discomfort. Nor do I believe that instead of an attempted description of this state of the spirit, a metaphor would serve better— for example, the piercing sting of an arrow that penetrates a hip's naked flesh. This is not because one cannot employ an imaginary sensation to portray a known sensation— though nobody these days knows the feeling of being struck by an arrow, we all believe we can easily imagine it, the sense of being helpless, without protection in the presence of something that reaches us from alien and unknown spaces, and this also applies very well to the ring of the telephone—but, rather, because the arrow's peremptory inexorability, without modulations, excludes all the intentions, implications, hesitations possible in the voice of someone I do not see, though even before he says anything I can already predict, if not what he will say, at least what my reaction to what he is about to say will be. Ideally, the book would begin by giving the sense of a space occupied by my presence, because all around me there are only inert objects, including the telephone, a space that apparently cannot contain anything but me, isolated in my interior time, and then there is the interruption of the continuity of time, the space is no longer what it was before because it is occupied by the ring, and my presence is no longer what it was before because it is conditioned by the will of this object that is calling. The book would have to begin by conveying all this not merely immediately, but as a diffusion through space and time of these rings that lacerate the continuity of space and time and will.

Perhaps the mistake lies in establishing that at the beginning I and a telephone are in a finite space such as my house would be, whereas what I must communicate is my situation with regard to numerous telephones that ring; these telephones are perhaps not calling me, have no relation to me, but the mere fact that I can be called to a telephone suffices to make it possible or at least conceivable that I may be called by all telephones. For example, when the telephone rings in a house near mine, for a moment I wonder if it is ringing in my house—a suspicion that immediately proves unfounded but which still leaves a wake, since it is possible

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