The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

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.*

If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.