12 May 2026
A week with Calvino
I had been racing through novels all winter, two or three at a time, and remembering almost nothing. So I tried an experiment with Invisible Cities: one city a night, read aloud, and then the book closed.
It turns out a single page can hold a whole evening if you let it. Calvino describes a city of memory, a city of desire, a city of the dead — and because I was not allowed to move on, I sat with each one until it had somewhere to live in me.
"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears."
By Sunday I had read perhaps fifty pages. Fewer than I would normally manage in a single sitting, and yet I can still walk through every one of those cities a week later. Slowness, it seems, is not the opposite of progress.