Saturday, June 01, 2013

Spectator at a distance …

… The Dreams of Italo Calvino by Jonathan Galassi | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

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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