I turned off the light and read. I read Turgenieff. I knew that now, reading it in the oversensitized state of my mind after too much brandy, I would remember it somewhere, and afterward it would seem as though it had really happened to me. I would always have it. That was another good thing you paid for and then had.
-The Sun Also Rises (153)
Sometimes, when we wake suddenly in the night, we could swear that the window was on the right and the door behind our head, but a single clue, a gleam of light from the window or the ticking of a watch, is sufficient to make everything fall back into its proper place.
-Cosmos, Witold Gombrowicz
I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment or place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told.
-If on a winter's night a traveler (109)
And one felt hushed, for a word might knock the cosmos out of kilter.
-The End of the Road
When revisiting places we once frequented as children, it is not unusual to observe how much smaller everything seems. This experience has too often been attributed to the physical differences between a child and an adult. In fact it has more to do with epistemological dimensions than with bodily dimensions: knowledge is hot water on wool. It shrinks time and space. (Admittedly, there is the matter where boredom, due to repetition, stretches time and space.)
-House of Leaves
"In life," he said, "there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius's point of view and be called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn't think he was a minor character in anything, I dare say. Or suppose you're an usher in a wedding. From the groom's viewpoint he's the major character; the others play supporting parts, even the bride. From your viewpoint, though, the wedding is a minor episode in the very interesting history of your life, and the bride and groom are body minor figures. What you've done is choose to play the part of a minor character: it can be pleasant for you to pretend to be less important than you know you are, as Odysseus does when he disguises as a swineherd. And every member of the congregation at the wedding sees himself as the major character condescending to witness the spectacle. So in this sense fiction isn't a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life.
"Now...we're the ones who conceive the story and give other people the essences of minor characters. But since no man's life story as a rule is ever one story with a coherent plot, we're always reconceiving the sort of hero we are, and consequently just the sort of minor roles that other people are supposed to play."
...
"Now many crises in people's lives occur because the hero role that they've assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, or--the same thing in effect--because they haven't the imagination to distort the new situation to fit their old role. This happens to parents, for instance, when their children begin to grow older, and to lovers when one of them begins to dislike the other."
-The End of the Road (71-72)
Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.
At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as, "You advance always with your head turned back?" or "Is what you see always behind you?" or rather, "Does your journey take place only in the past?"
All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the rate he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
-Invisible Cities (28-29)
But how can one avoid telling a story ex post facto? Can nothing ever be described as it really was, reconstituted in its anonymous actuality? Will no one ever be able to reproduce the incoherence of the living moment at its moment of birth? Born as we are out of chaos, why can we never establish contact with it? No sooner do we look at it than order, pattern, shape is born under our eyes.
...
As I am telling this story in retrospect, I cannot tell it as it really happened. Take that arrow, for instance. That evening it was no more important than Leo's game of chess, the newspaper or my cup of tea; everything happened at the same level, combined into a kind of concert, like the buzzing of a swarm of bees. But now I know in retrospect that the most important thing that evening was the arrow, so I am giving it a prominent place in the story, shaping the future out of a mass of undifferentiated facts.
-Cosmos (30-31)
While the monk was talking, he kept looking different from moment to moment. His smoke-colored hair clung to his ears like mildew and changed depending on the time of the day: it looked as though the monk aged slightly but visibly every afternoon. With each word he uttered, something on him changed: his mustache, eyes, knees, fingers, the color of his nails...when he composed a sentence he was another man. Had the sentence been different, he would have been different. He only stayed the same when he yawned.
...
Father Luke yawned imperceptibly, and remained ugly.
-Landscape Painted With Tea (63)
There is always something essential that remains outside the written sentence; indeed, 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 unwritten.
-If on a winter's night a traveler (203)
My working method more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.
-Italo Calvino
"They won't get us," I said. "Because you're too brave. Nothing ever happens to the brave."
"They die of course."
"But only once."
"I don't know. Who said that?"
"The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?"
"Of course. Who said it?"
"I don't know."
"He was probably a coward," she said. "He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them."
"I don't know. It's hard to see inside the head of the brave."
"Yes. That's how they keep it that way."
"Yes. That's how they keep it that way."
-A Farewell to Arms (139-140)
I rather enjoy that sense of bewilderment a novel gives you when you start reading it, but if the first effect is fog, I'm afraid the moment the fog lifts my pleasure in reading it will be lost, too.
-If on a winter's night a traveler (30)
Long novels today are perhaps a contradiction; the dimension of time has perhaps been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.
-If on a winter's night a traveler (8)
But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself.
-If on a winter's night a traveler (9)
Still, I wish the things I read weren't all present, so solid you can touch them; I would like to feel a presence around them, something else, you don't know quite what, the sign of some unknown thing...
-If on a winter's night a traveler (46)
