If on a winter's night a traveler Fate and Free Will Quotes

Calvino wastes no time in telling you that he's dictating your life for the time being. That right, you are the "You" whom this book addresses from the opening line. It all makes it seem as though the book has some higher knowledge of your life and what you're doing. This feeling will only grow stronger for you as the story unfolds. After all, the book says so.

When you read a book, you're in charge, right? Wrong. (According to Calvino, at least.) The speaker even warns you against getting too involved in the story and allowing yourself to be manipulated by it. There's a fatefulness to this statement: a sense that the book might always be one step ahead of you, the way that Ermes Marana always seems to be a step ahead of you. But the book doesn't go so far as to say you're totally out to lunch. Rather, you have the ability to make choices in the way you navigate this book, but you need to be careful and attentive about it.

Once again, you, as a Reader, have been guided along by the author of the book without even knowing it. Every time your reading starts to settle into a comfortable pattern, every time you try to "lose" yourself in the book, some voice like this pops out and reminds you not to get too comfortable. At this point, part of you might want to just shout, "Stop playing God, Calvino! Let me read in peace!" Just saying.

Silas Flannery, in an attempt to sit down and write, wishes that he weren't involved in his writing at all. Maybe if he were totally passive in his writing, he'd be happier about doing it. But instead, he feels that his possibilities are limited by the fact that he's an individual with free will. If only some sort of larger force could take over his writing, maybe then he could fulfill his fantasy of writing a book that is "true."

In his desire to give up his sense of free will, Flannery thinks of how he might erase himself by changing the way he talks about writing. For example, maybe if he never uses the word "I," he can take himself out of his writing. After all, an earlier section of the book mentions that "I" is just a place holder we use when we talk about ourselves; it can refer to anyone, and maybe erasing the "I" can erase you from language. Think about it.

Silas Flannery meditates on a story about the writing of the Qur'an, and ultimately decides that Abdullah was wrong to lose his faith. Flannery later adds: "[Abdullah] was the one who had to deal with the internal coherence of the written language, with grammar and syntax, to channel into it the fluidity of a thought that expands outside all language before it becomes word" (15.62). In other words, because Abdullah was responsible for putting into writing a divine thought that is beyond writing, the task of finding the best way to say it lay entirely with him. He didn't realize the point that Calvino makes throughout this novel: that all writing tries to express something that at the end of the day is inexpressible. There could never be a perfect way of taking down the Prophet's words, because there is no such thing as perfection in writing. Writing always tries to say exactly what a person (or even God) means, but it must always fall short. The important thing for Calvino is that the writer keep striving.

Silas Flannery, encountering a group of boy scouts, hears them say that a UFO is nearby and that aliens have been trying to send communications through the brainwaves of an author living in the area. This author is no doubt Flannery himself, who earlier this same day has been wondering about how he could become a passive conduit for someone else's ideas. Now he learns that he might actually be a conduit and not even know it. His fantasy might have already come true. There's just no way of telling. Classic Calvino.

In the final scene of Around an empty grave, the young Nacho realizes that his adventures have been guided completely by fate. Throughout the story, he's heard people speak about when his father came to Oquedal and how a man named Faustino Higueras was killed. At this final moment, Nacho realizes that he is reliving the exact battle that his father had with Faustino. Having seen his young opponent earlier in the novel, Nacho also realizes that fate has been leading him to this moment for some time. In this scene, Calvino plays on the reader's expectation that everything that happens in a book happens for a reason. But what Calvino doesn't give you is the end of the battle; you never get to find out if Nacho simply recreated his father's victory, or if fate had other plans for him.

Arkadian Porphyrich, the Ircanian official, tells you about the "Spirit" that he thinks is involved in the process of reading. On the one hand, Porphyrich says that when he reads, he's disinterested. But at the same time, he's always alert to the potential meanings a book could have. In this sense, Calvino uses this scene to speak about the Spirit of reading itself, in which the reader doesn't have free will, but neither does the book fully control him. Instead, there's a dialogue that happens between the two—a dialogue that can only function properly if the reader comes to the book with an open mind.

Ah, the demise of Ermes Marana, a man who once thought he could control language entirely by intentionally filling it with falsehood. In the end, Marana has admitted that "'in reading, something happens over which I have no power'" (19.18). In this passage, Porphyrich claims that this conclusion is not surprising, since he has already realized that just as language can never control what it's trying to say, the police cannot control language by banning reading. No matter what type of free will people try to bring to language, and no matter how much they try to control the meanings of words, there will always be something that escapes them. This is the fate of language, and in a paradoxical way, this fate is what gives humans the free will to always keep striving for better uses of language.