If on a winter's night a traveler Education Quotes

Your first impression of Lotaria reveals that she is a student at "the university," where she scorns people like her sister who read for pleasure without trying to "clarif[y] the problems" in a book. How dare they read for pleasure!

Lotaria's reading practices are obsessively political and have little to do with the pleasure of reading. She doesn't appreciate, but only analyzes books according to many academic frameworks like psychoanalysis, feminism, and Marxism. You can tell from the tone of this passage alone that Calvino paints a pretty unsympathetic picture of her, compared to people who read for pleasure. Down with literary criticism! (Wait, can we say that?)

This guy, Irnerio, has strangely enough taught himself how not to read. He's fed up with all the writing in advertisements and signs that bombard him daily, and so he's learned to literally look through words. By looking at words very intensely, he's able to make them meaningless. For example, you can look at the words in front of you and think of them as scribbles across a screen instead of anything meaningful. You can also repeat a word over and over again in your mouth until it just becomes a noise. Go ahead. Give it a try. We'll wait…

Professor Uzzi-Tuzii mentions that his subject—the Cimmerian language—doesn't get studied by anyone anymore. Sounds like pretty much everyone's experience in grad school, right? And sure enough, Calvino is poking fun at institutions of higher learning, which often teach subjects that have little relevance to today's real-world problems. Actually, not only do they teach unimportant things, but they teach these things according to changes in fashion. Example? At certain points, certain dead languages are "cooler" than others. Also, the professor seems to criticize students like Lotaria, who aren't actually interested in learning anything concrete about a language, but only in debating larger, general problems and connecting large ideas to one another. At least on this point, Calvino's with the professor. Though it's not saying much to say that Calvino likes you more than Lotaria.

The descriptive language of this passage can almost tell you everything you need to know about what Calvino thinks of academic readers. The female students "with limpid, serene eyes" sound like they're under some sort of brain-numbing spell; the pale man who forces his way through them is Professor Galligani, the professional rival of Uzzi-Tuzii. But before you even know anything about the man, Calvino gives Galligani "a sarcastic gaze and a systematically disillusioned curl to his lips." There are several loaded words in this description: for starters, "sarcastic" suggests that the professor prefers to approach the world from an ironic distance that is pretty much the opposite of the innocence that Calvino celebrates in Ludmilla. And the "disillusioned curl to his lips" suggests that the pleasure and wonder of life has been "systematically" bled out of Galligan. What's the system that's done this? Most likely the university.

In order to get a look at a book that interests you, you and Ludmilla sit down with a university study group. You're desperate to get on with the reading, but you have to wait for the students to figure out their personal agendas before listening to the story. All of these agendas are annoyingly intellectual and pointless; the students use them to carve up the book like a dead turkey.

According to Calvino, this desire to dissect and analyze a book completely destroys the pleasure of reading and even leads the students to tear up the book and scatter it over several departments. This physical mutilation is basically just an expression of the symbolic mutilation they commit on the book by the way they read. In other words, Calvino's not the biggest fan of this crew.

After Lotaria stops reading Without fear of wind or vertigo, you ask her if you can see the manuscript so you can continue reading. The class, though, is only interested in discussing the book in academic terms. They care so little about the story and so much about the "ideas" they can discuss through it that they've even allowed the original manuscript to be torn up and scattered over various departments. They feel absolutely nothing of the desire that makes you and Ludmilla want to continue reading. And in Calvino's world, there's no worse perversion that education could produce.

You're probably familiar with this whole idea after reading about the fight between Uzzi-Tuzii and Galligani at the university. But what is significant about these comments is that Mr. Cavedagna is the guy speaking them. Cavedagna is a man who truly resents the "education" that he's been given by working in a publishing house. He yearns to go back to the days of his childhood, when he could read with a completely open sense of wonder.

In this scene, you could almost say that Calvino is speaking to us through Cavedagna, insisting that academic readers like Uzzi-Tuzii and Galligani have been corrupted by their involvement with the university, which has taught them to analyze books at the expense of appreciating them, and to wage stupid turf wars instead of celebrating the beauty of literature. Amen.

Well, this is about as much sympathy for Lotaria as you're going to get out of Calvino. In this passage, Silas Flannery admits that Lotaria is a very serious and conscientious reader. Her problem, though, is that she's had her approach to reading deformed by her education, which teaches her to use books as evidence to prove things she already thinks. After all, isn't this what English teachers do? They ask you to develop a thesis statement and then to find evidence in a book that supports that statement. Calvino insists over and over again that you can't enjoy literature by reading this way. Instead, you have to keep your mind open to all the different directions that a book wants to lead you. So don't feel bad if you're not the biggest fan of reading books for English class. Calvino is with you on that one.

In his meeting with Lotaria, Silas Flannery also manages to articulate Calvino's idea of how a reader should keep an open mind toward books. The problem with Lotaria is not that she's educated, but that her education has taught her to see the world in strictly black and white terms. So when Flannery suggests that maybe she shouldn't be so pushy about the ideas she brings to texts, Lotaria automatically assumes that he wants her to be a passive, idiotic reader who just accepts everything an author says.

Flannery tries to explain that this isn't what he wants. What he wants is for his readers to keep an open mind and learn things from a book that neither they nor the author had thought of before. But Lotaria just can't wrap her head around this idea, and she insists again that Flannery must want her to be an "escapist and regressive" reader (15.87). Calvino is trying to show us that there is a third way to go about reading, a way that doesn't give final authority to either the reader or the author.

After Lotaria has shown how a computer can read and analyze books for her, Flannery becomes troubled about his own writing. Now that he knows that people like Lotaria are out there reading his novels this way, he stresses about what conclusions a computer would draw from his stories. In this sense, Calvino suggests that the academic approach to reading has a way of infecting what it touches and ruining pleasure for anyone who's interested in stories for their own sake. Lotaria's approach to reading is a form of pollution in this book, and even though Calvino gives her approach some credit for the energy it brings to literature, he ultimately finds that it does way more harm than good.