How Well I Would Write If I

You Are About To Begin Reading Italo Calvino's New Novel, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler.

You Reach A Moment In Life When, Among The People You Have Known, The Dead Outnumber The Living. And The Mind Refuses To Accept More Faces, More Expressions: On Every New Face You Encounter, It Prints The Old Forms, For Each One It Finds The Most Suitable Mask.

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.

Cities, Like Dreams, Are Made Of Desires And Fears, Even If The Thread Of Their Discourse Is Secret, Their Rules Are Absurd, Their Perspectives Deceitful, And Everything Conceals Something Else.

The Inferno Of The Living Is Not Something That Will Be; If There Is One, It Is What Is Already Here, The Inferno Where We Live Every Day, That We Form By Being Together. There Are Two Ways To Escape Suffering It. The First Is Easy For Many: Accept The Inferno And Become Such A Part Of It That You Can No Longer See It. The Second Is Risky And Demands Constant Vigilance And Apprehension: Seek And Learn To Recognize Who And What, In The Midst Of Inferno, Are Not Inferno, Then Make Them Endure, Give Them Space.