Authentic solidarity with workers was not all that easy, for him, however—an ambition perhaps more than an achieved reality. In 1950 we find him writing that “for four days I managed to feel very closely tied up with and in a certain sense essential to the working-class struggle, something that has not happened for some time now.” In 1951, he protests, perhaps a bit too much, to a fellow writer that “the writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.”
I was born into a family of factory-workers. During the '70s, from time to time, I worked on construction crews building stores. Calvino might have tried something like that. (By the way, that was one of the happiest times of my life.)
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