LITERATURE: If on a winter’s night… – Escapism?

This is an interesting section and again, I am not all that sure I’ve caught the drift of it.  What story down there awaits its end? is first person, the narrator walking down a street of a large, crowded city, mentally erasing all that he is not interested in seeing.  This includes people, buildings, things; everything to bring it to a "smooth vertical surface, a slab of opaque glass, a partition that defines space without imposing itself on one’s sight."

Except for one person, Franziska, who is a friend he runs into on this street occasionally and who he spots in the distance.  And two men whom he did not wish to encounter who speak of a new group coming to inhabit this space and who thank him for helping to "clean it up."

Once again, I find myself pondering rather than contemplating Calvino’s words.  In the meantime, I see the imagery:

So here I am walking along this empty surface that is the world.  There is a wind grazing the ground, dragging with flurries of fine snow the last residue of the vanished world:  a bunch of ripe grapes which seems just picked from the vine, an infant’s woolen bootee, a well-oiled hinge, a page that seems torn from a novel written in Spanish, with a woman’s name:  Amaranta.  Was it a few seconds ago that everything ceased to exist, or many centuries?  I’ve already lost any sense of time.  (p. 248)

True, it does bring in a hint of the other stories, most obviously in the name of Amaranta.  But there is the emphasis here on a "sense of time."  The narrator also intends to re-establish the world at some point, bringing all back to what it was, though this is not the plan of the two men who stand between him and Franziska. 

I wonder too, if perhaps the cleansing and redefining of the world is a metaphor for that of the literary world, of words written that will be replaced by new ones, and if the narrator’s intention is to hold onto the classics.

A twist at the end, and I am thinking that this might be geared towards explaining the writer’s audience, the readers.  Could it be the way one "erases" the reality around him as he reads?  The narrator’s intention of a temporary change of world would indicate so. The friendly face and welcoming warmth of Franziska returns him to his world, where she clearly sees the city around them.