-Numbers in the Dark- by Italo Calvino

Calvino has a way of taking a 2-paged short story and leaving me utterly confused and breathless the second I come to the final punctuation. Literally, a 2-paged story will drive me into a stupor and I find myself having to put down the compilation of short stories and asking myself, “What the fuck just happened?”

“Ladies and Gentlemen, there are people whose greatest pleasure is to have others urinate on them. D'Annunzio was one such, they say. I believe it. You should remember that every day, and remember that we are all the same race, and not to act so superior. And what about this: my aunt gave birth to a son with the body of a cat. You should remember that things like that happen, never forget it. And that in Turin there are people who sleep on the pavements, over warm cellar gratings. I've seen them. You should think about all these things, every evening, instead of saying your prayers. And you should keep them in mind during the day. Then your heads won't be so full of plans and hypocrisy.”

—Italio Clavino, Wind in a City

“Each woman was a world unto herself, or rather each was a sky where I must trace the positions of stars, planets, orbits, eclipses, inclinations and conjunctions, solstice and equinox. Each firmament had its own movement, in line with its own mechanism and rhythm.”

—Italo Calvino, Numbers in the Dark: The Memoirs of Casanova

“Every desire traces its curve within us, a line that climbs, wavers, sometimes dissolves. The line the absent woman evoked in me might, a second before it began to decline, intersect with the line of my curiosity in the present woman, and transmit its upward thrust to this still all undiscovered trajectory.”

—Italo Calvino, Numbers in the Dark: The Memoirs of Casanova
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