Thursday, 2 February 2012

Italo Calvino - "The Baron in the Trees"

"There is the moment when the silence of the countryside gathers in the ear and breaks into a myria dof souds: a croaking and squeaking, a switft ruslte in the grass, a plop in the water, a pattering on earth and pebbles, and high above all, the call of the cicada."

"It should be said that in those days the winters in our parts were mild, and never had the freezing cold of nowadays which they say was loosed from its lair in Russia by Napoleon and followed him all the way here."

"I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did. Only by being so frankly himself as he was til his death could he give something to all men."

"Ombrosa no longer exists. Looking at the empty sky, I ask myself if it ever did really exist. That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit's tread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends."

I liked it. I wasn't mesmerized by it but some passages caught my eye and held it. It was written in a most easy, eloquent style.