LITERATURE: If on a winter’s night… – Relating & Sex as Space

I laughed aloud at this one, where I feel Calvino has surely stuck this particular reader into his book as well:

At all these reflections of mine, Mr. Okeda remained silent, as he does always when I happen to talk too much and am unable finally to extricate myself from my tangled reasoning. (p. 203)

And oh yes, the ginkgo leaf falling through space and all that; well it all comes down to sex:

Though tormented by these circumstances, I managed to concentrate and subdivide the generic sensation of my sex pressed by the sex of Madame Miyagi into the compartmented sensations of the individual points of me and her, progressively subjected to pressure by my sliding movements and her convulsive contractions (p. 209)

And somehow, with a final though back to the ginko leaf analogy, the narrator has managed to both combine and separate individual sensations into the whole.