LITERATURE: If on a winter’s night… – Mind Games

Never has an author or a book–at least any that I have read–involved my full attention quite so much not out of difficulty but rather out of an intimacy Calvino forms with the reader who is willing to accept his lead.

You, reader, believed that there, on the platform, my gaze was glued to the hands of the round clock of an old station, hands pierced like halberds, in the vain attempt to turn them back, to move backward over the cemetery of spent hours, lying lifeless in their circular pantheon.  But who can say that the clock’s numbers aren’t peeping from rectangular windows, where I see every minute fall on me with a click like the blade of a guillotine?  However, the result would not change much: even advancing in a pokished, sliding world, my hand contracted on the light rudder of the wheeled suitcase would still express an inner refusal, as if that carefree luggage represented for me an unwelcome and exhausting burden. (p. 13)

In lieu of a defined visual of the train station, Calvino offers some suggestions that we might imagine in one time period or another; hanging the trappings a bit and as he notes, the outcome remaining the same.

He plays with space obviously; but time–symbolized by the clock that we are not to take literally–is manipulated as well.  Time as measure is described in its physical form.  In other words, as I see it, an old fashioned wall hung stainless steel clock, with hands moving the minutes and hours will indicate a time further back in space that will match an old train station–though again, perhaps in its own newness of state of being.  A digital indicator of time will call up a different image of the train station, the traveler himself. 

No, we don’t get into the author’s head here–and never should we; but the narrator’s is open to us as is the case in first person point of view.  But here’s the twist: he has entered our’s–the readers’–as well.

Love it!