In getting ready to publish Firenze, I revisited some of my favorite Italian writers, including Italo Calvino. I picked up a copy of his first novel The Path to the Spiders’ Nest and was particularly struck by a few passages in the the preface, which Calvino wrote years later when revisiting his early work.
What you read and what you experience in life are not two separate worlds, but one single cosmos. Every life-experience, in order to be interpreted properly, evokes certain things you have read and blends into them. That books always derive from other books is a truth which is only apparently in contradiction with the other truth, that books derive from practical existence and from our relations with other people.
There is another point: for those who start writing after one of those experiences that leave you with ‘so many things to say’ (the war in this, and in so many other cases), the first book instantly becomes a barrier between you and that experience, it severs the links that bind you to those facts, destroys your precious hoard of memories – a hoard in the sense that it would have become a reserve on which to draw permanently if you had been patient enough to husband it, if you had not been in such a hurry to spend it, to squander it, to impose an arbitrary hierarchy on the images that you had kept stored there, to separate the privileged images, which you believed contained a genuinely poetic emotion, from the others, those which seemed to concern you too closely or too little for you to be able to portray them; in short to set up in your arrogance a different memory, one that has been given another shape instead of your whole memory with its blurred outlines and its infinite capacity for retrieval… Your memory will never again recover from this violence that you have done to it by writing your book.
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