“The artist’s imagination is a world of potentialities that no work will succeed in realizing. What we experience by living is another world, answering to other forms of order and disorder. The layers of words that accumulate on the page, like the layers of colours on the canvas, are yet another world, also infinite by being more easily controlled, less refractory to formulation. The link between the three worlds is the indefinable spoken of by Balzac: or rather, I would call it the undecidable, the paradox of an infinite whole that contains other infinite wholes.”
(page 97)
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium. Trans. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988.
Libraries Within Libraries 