Homage to read "In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nisi in angulo cum nusquam inventory book."
The first experiences have taught me to appreciate the written word go back to elementary school days. A teacher "enlightened" we did have to read "Marcovaldo" by Italo Calvino. Could not have chosen better book for the children who had just learned to read and write. The prose of Calvin, simple and plain, I opened a new world of words, images and emotions.
Even today, when I browse the novel, reading is influenced by childhood experience first, so that it's hard to tell if the pleasure I feel when I read it is related to the prose of Calvin or the memory of that first contact with the literature.
Then came the years in which the written word was mostly made up of texts contained in the "balloons" in the "clouds of smoke" of comic books, pictures and words, a different kind of reading, other emotions.
Years pass, other prevalent forms of expression, radio, television, newspapers, all important, useful, essential, but the pleasure, the pleasure of reading literary works was to be born, grow. It could be the book that he had discussed in a TV talk show or board of prof. literature, but always the greatest pleasure was to be lost between the pages of a novel as you can get lost in the woods: After Calvin: Primo Levi, Gadda, Borges, Raymond Queneau, Proust and many others, and each was a new trail in wood literature.
Each new reading added something to the other, cast a new light on the books that I've read and what I read. Some readings, a job explaining to other books, I immunize against other diseases through reading, as the herdsman or the lyricism, that acted as a sort of "cow culture."
I discovered that there is literature that is an end in itself, not seeking social or moral justification (I think, to mention only two names, and Manganelli Nabokov), and there are those who would use writing as a means of passing messages, but as someone said the usual response of a stupid question journalist: "what message he wanted to convey with this?": "if I wanted to send a message would not have written a novel, I sent a telegram."
In this way the experiences related to reading are growing in layers one on top: sometimes the love an author can make me want to learn a foreign language (as happened with Proust and Queneau the French language) , sometimes love can make you wish for a book to visit a country or city (as happened with "A Moveable Feast," Hemingway's Paris.)
short, as Italo Calvino wrote: "reading means facing something that is just beginning to exist." The adventure continues.
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