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.

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.*

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.

Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.