If on a winter's night a traveler Innocence Quotes

The speaker of If on a winter's night a traveler makes a direct statement on his relationship to time and how he wishes he could change it. He'd love to get back to some new beginning, but this is impossible for him, since every attempt to do so just piles up a bunch of new history, changing him and his situation.

It's kind of like what Heraclitus meant when he said you can't step into the same river twice (we all know that reference, right?). Also, the speaker leaves traces in the book even as he wonders about these things; after all, he's also accumulating more and more black ink as your reading eyes move across the page. In this early passage, Calvino gives us a taste of the desire for innocence that he will explore more thoroughly in characters like Ludmilla and Mr. Cavedagna.

The man tries to explain to Madame Marne in the station that he wishes he could make clocks "run backward," or that he could suddenly go back in time and relive his life from the beginning. (Maybe all he really needs is a Ford Delorean and a Flux Capacitor.) Why does he want all this? Because he can't bear to lose out on all of the potential things he could have done with his life, like maybe date Madame Marne when he and she were younger and more beautiful. It's this love of pure potential that makes the man want to go back in time; and this innocent desire for pure potential in how a story might unfold is exactly what Calvino is trying to provoke in you by giving you only the beginnings of novels. For Calvino, this innocent love of potential makes for ideal reading, and this book's major goal is to teach you this kind of reading.

Ludmilla's innocence is what makes her Calvino's ideal reader, right? But in this passage, you have to wonder if Irnerio is even more innocent than she is. After all, Irnerio avoids reader expectations altogether by teaching himself not to read. In the description Calvino gives here, it seems as if Irnerio has gone beyond innocence and reached a state of wildness, like a "native of the forest." The mention of hunting and gathering specifically refers to a stage of human culture that came before the invention of reading and writing. Calvino uses Irnerio to help his readers stay in touch with the fact that there is a limit to language, and that in order to keep an open mind to reading, we should always keep this limit in mind.

After you and Ludmilla decide that a visit to the publisher is in order, Ludmilla refuses to go with you. When you push her on this, she insists that she doesn't want to get involved with the production side of books. She has an innocence in her that she's trying to protect. In other words, she doesn't want to know the magician's secrets; she just wants to keep thinking of books as things that come to her as fully finished, magical objects.

Mr. Cavedagna, the man from the printing house, entertains the hope that when he retires, he'll be able to return to the reading practice of his boyhood days, when he'd steal away into his family's chicken coop and read (maybe minus the awful smell). He wants to return to a point of innocence the same way that the speaker in the first novel, "If on a winter's night a traveler," wishes he could turn back time to a new beginning. Cavedagna is reasonably fearful that he won't be able to go back, though, since it's not easy to unlearn something you already know.

As a reader, you're depressed by your visit to the printing house. You can no longer think of a book as something you can open, enjoy, then be done with. You can no longer entertain the idea that you've fully "understood" a book once you've read it. When you see books taken apart and put back together in a printer's shop, you realize that words and stories can fly off in different directions. And you also know that Ermes Marana has filled everything you read with uncertainty. Can Ludmilla give you a big "I told you so"?

Since Calvino deeply explores the pleasure of reading and, in some instances, writing, the theme of innocence applies nicely to the "crisis" facing Silas Flannery. He's a man who writes books for people's pleasure, but the increasing commodification of his work is starting to weigh on him, taking away from the actual literary value of his craft. The reader can sense the extent to which the corporate world weighs on Flannery through the exhaustive list of products and places Flannery must draw upon as he writes. In a mental sense, the man is being crushed under a mountain of shiny new products and exotic destinations.

For the first time, you assign some sort of name to what Ludmilla, the innocent reader, asks of the text. The term "buried anguish" seems to offer a "final condition of truth," though it's very difficult to figure out what Calvino means by this statement. Is literature then supposed to uncover something buried, a form of pain and suffering that wells up in us when we read a book with open hearts? You could interpret this passage as basically saying, "the truth hurts, so deal with it." After all, it's pretty tough to make it through If on a winter's night a traveler without a little pain, right?

Silas Flannery expresses a desire similar to Ludmilla's and Mr. Cavedagna's, which is for a sort of disinterested or innocent reading. This has been ruined in some ways for Flannery, who cannot read without thinking of his own obligation to write for a living. People who love certain hobbies often find that this love fades when their hobbies turn into jobs, and Flannery is certainly feeling this sort of effect. The obligation to write enslaves him, especially when he has to keep in mind what brand of wine his characters must drink, what type of shoes they need to wear, etc.

You're probably not surprised to hear that Calvino associates education with a loss of innocence. Silas Flannery writes this passage in his diary following a meeting with Lotaria, in which Lotaria told him about how a computer can draw conclusions from his books by analyzing how often the books use certain words. Basically, Flannery wishes he didn't know that this type of reader was out there, because now he finds he can't write without worrying about what a computer will make of his work. Flannery's pleasure in writing has already fallen into crisis, and learning about Lotaria's way of reading only makes things worse. Remember the good ol' days what it was actual humans who read books?