t zero (A Harvest/HBJ BookH)

t zero (A Harvest/HBJ BookH)

Italo Calvino

Language: English

Pages: 152

ISBN: 0156924005

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


A collection of stories about time, space, and the evolution of the universe in which the author blends mathematics with poetic imagination. “Calvino does what very few writers can do: he describes imaginary worlds with the most extraordinary precision and beauty” (Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books). Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

to brighten them in flashes or else in sprays. We undulated with no sense of direction, drawn by an obscure current so light that it seemed downright impalpable and yet strong enough to drag us up in very high waves and down in their troughs. Zylphia would plunge headlong beneath me in a violet, almost black whirlpool, then soar over me rising toward the more scarlet stripes * * * that ran beneath the luminous vault. We felt all this through the layers of our former surface dilated to

the world) or contain only me, or me in relation to something (or to the world), or something (the world) without me any more. To make this point clear, I realize now, I have gone back to talking in general terms, losing the ground gained with my previous clarifications; this often happens in love stories. I was becoming aware of what was happening around me through what was happening to the nucleus and especially to the chromosomes of the nucleus; through them I gained the awareness of a void

uncertain in marking places and distances: somewhere a rat is gnawing, an ill man groans, * * * a boat's siren announces its entry into the Marseilles roads, and Abbé Faria's spade continues digging its way among these stones. I don't know how many times Abbé Faria has attempted to escape: each time he has worked for months prising up the stone slabs, crumbling the seams of mortar, perforating the rock with rudimentary awls; but at the moment when the pick's last blow should open his way

completely at my ease; whereas the elements I derive from what I see and what I hear are confused, full of gaps, more and more contradictory. * * * In the early days of my imprisonment, when my desperate acts of rebellion hadn't yet brought me to rot in this solitary cell, the routine tasks of prison life had caused me to climb up and down stairs and bastions, cross the entrance halls and posterns of the Château d'If; but from all the images retained by my memory, which now I keep arranging

midnight the cleaning women wax the floors of the offices. Rationalize, that's the big task: rationalize if you don't want everything to come apart. Tonight we're dining in town, in a restaurant on the terrace of a twenty-fourth floor. It's a business dinner: there are six of us; there is also Dorothy, and the wife of Dick Bemberg. I eat some oysters, I look at a star that's called (if I have the right one) Betelgeuse. We make conversation: we husbands talk about production; the ladies, about

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