Free If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino Page A

after sunset has confined me for months within the boundaries of the daytime world. But this is not all: the fact is that I find in the day's light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night's.
    Wednesday evening. Every evening I spend the first hours of darkness penning these pages, which I do not know if anyone will ever read. The pâte de verre globe in my room at the Kudgiwa Pension illuminates the flow of my writing, perhaps too nervous for a future reader to decipher. Perhaps this diary will come to light many, many years after my death, when our language will have undergone who knows what transformations, and some of the words and expressions I use normally will seem outdated and of ambiguous meaning. In any case, the person who finds this diary will have one certain advantage over me: with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and a grammar, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world's intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things. I would like this hovering of presentiments and suspicions to reach the person who reads me not as an accidental obstacle to understanding what I write, but as its very substance; and if the process of my thoughts seems elusive to him who,
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    setting out from radically changed mental habits, will seek to follow it, the important thing is that I convey to him the effort I am making to read between the lines of things the evasive meaning of what is in store for me.
    Thursday. Thanks to a special permit from the director's office—Miss Zwida explained to me—she can enter the prison on visitors' day and sit at the table in the parlor with her drawing pad and her charcoal. The simple humanity of the prisoners' relatives offers some interesting subjects for studies from life.
    I had asked her no question, but since she had realized that I saw her yesterday in the yard, she felt it her duty to explain her presence in that place. I would have preferred her to tell me nothing, because I feel no attraction toward drawings of human figures and I would not have known how to comment on them if she had shown them to me, an eventuality that, however, did not occur. I thought those drawings were perhaps kept in a special album, which she left in the prison office between times, since yesterday—I recalled clearly—she did not have with her the inseparable bound album or her pencil box.
    "If I knew how to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects," I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subject and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognize my moods in the motionless suffering of things.
    Miss Zwida proved at once to be in agreement: the object she would have drawn most willingly, she said, was one of those little anchors with four flukes, known as "grapnels," which the fishing boats use. She pointed some out to me as we passed the boats tied up at the dock, and she explained to me the difficulty that the four barbs represented for anyone wanting to draw them in their various angles and perspectives. I understood that the object contained a message for me, and I should decipher it: the
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    anchor, an exhortation to attach myself, to cling, to delve, to end my fluctuating condition, my remaining on the surface. But such an interpretation left room for doubts: this could also be an invitation to cast off, to set forth toward the open sea. Something in the grapnel's form, the four hooked teeth, the four iron arms worn by the scraping against the rock of the seabed, warned me that no decision would preclude laceration and suffering. Still, I could be relieved that it was not a heavy, ocean-going anchor,