The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.
Italo CalvinoRead
Whether there is such a thing as Reality, of which the various levels are only partial aspects, or whether there are only levels, is something that literature cannot decide. Literature recognizes rather the *reality of the levels.*
Interpretation
Literature reflects different aspects of reality without defining what reality truly is.
In this quote, Italo Calvino suggests that literature has the unique ability to explore and represent various levels of reality, but it cannot provide a definitive understanding of what reality itself is. Instead of presenting a single truth, literature acknowledges the multiplicity of perspectives, each revealing only a fraction of the broader, undefined reality.
In practice
In a book club discussion about the nature of reality in literature.
The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.
Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.
We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
If I had never joined a church till I had found one that was perfect, I should never_x000D_ have joined one at all; and the moment I did join it, if I had found one, I should have_x000D_ spoiled it, for it would not have been a perfect church after I had become a member of_x000D_ it. Still, imperfect as it is, it is the dearest place on earthto us.
How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?
Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)
I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.
The Internet causes billions of images to appear on millions of computer monitors around the planet. From this galaxy of sight and sound will the face of Christ emerge and the voice of Christ be heard? For it is only when his face is seen and his voice heard that the world will know the glad tidings of our redemption. This is the purpose of evangelization. And this is what will make the Internet a genuinely human space, for if there is no room for Christ, there is no room for man.
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