Italo Calvino, novelist, essayist, critic, editor, publisher, lived a life that seemed made of words. Like his Baron in the Trees, the legendary aristocrat who escaped in childhood to the upper canopy of a forest, he often seemed reluctant to be grounded on terra firma, much preferring flights of imagination.
In the title essay here, the piece that gives this collection its guiding philosophy, he explains something of that habit of mind. In his youth, he suggests, he had the belief that fictional worlds could illuminate the real world and vice versa. As he grew older, however, he was plagued by the sense that while “within books, experience is always possible… its reach does not extend beyond the blank margin of the page”. The external world, meanwhile, remained to him a stubborn and unpredictable mystery, one that never stopped “surprising me, frightening me, disorienting me”. This predicament, Calvino argues, was particularly stark for an Italian. His was a country that in its politics refused beginnings and middles and endings, a place “where many mysterious things happen, which are every day widely discussed and commented on but never solved; where every event hides a secret plot”.
