» link: short story: "before you say 'hello'," italo calvino
Now that a network of automatic connections extends across entire continents and every subscriber can call every other subscriber at will without asking anybody’s help, I must resign myself to paying for this extraordinary freedom with an expense of nervous energy, repetition of movements, time-wasting, growing frustration. (And to paying for it again in the form of extremely expensive bills, but the relationship between the act of telephoning and the experience of the cruel prices is not a direct one: the bills arrive every three months, a single direct-dial long distance call is drowned in an overall figure that generates the same stupor as those natural disasters in the face of which our resolve immediately finds the alibi of inevitability.) So great is the temptation the facility to telephone constitutes, that telephoning is becoming ever more difficult, even impossible. Everybody telephones everybody at every possible moment, and nobody can speak to anybody, signals go wandering up and down automatic search circuits, beating their wings like crazed butterflies, without managing to slip into a free line, each subscriber goes on firing off numbers into the exchanges convinced that it’s no more than a temporary local hitch. The truth is that the vast majority of calls are made without people having anything to say to each other, hence it hardly matters whether they get through or not, all they do is harm those few who really would have something to say.
I was going to say “calvino’s use of the second person in writing stories about love and desire is always really fascinating to me,” but what I’ll say instead is “italo calvino turns me into a mushy romantic.”
see also if on a winter’s night a traveler, one of my all-time favorite books.
May 07, 2009, 6:20pm Comments
