Italo Calvino: The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount

"Books are my religion," I said to a friend today.  He is not of a particularly literary bent, so he thought I meant that I just really, really, like them.  I do not like them; at least, I don't particularly enjoy reading as an activity.  I don't read for pleasure.  I read for understanding, and on rare occasion reading leads not only to understanding, but to being understood.  These moments are the equivalent of getting the Holy Ghost in church.  They are the moments where the divine is suddenly accessible to me personally.  I thought Italo Calvino understood me before these novellae.  The Baron in the Trees spoke to myself as a child.  His Italian Folktales (which some digging has revealed are far more his than not) spoke to myself as a scholar and a lover of stories.  But these two.  Man.

It is as though he is writing to me retroactively from the grave.  How did he know that I would be reading "The Nonexistent Knight" at exactly the moment I was struggling to believe that I even exist?  And even more startling, how did he arrange for me to read "The Cloven Viscount" after my own left side had been torn away in an accident?  This latter is far too specific.

I view my own religion, that of Books, with the same skepticism I apply to all religions:  it's fine unless you believe it.  I know very well that it is in my nature as a human to see myself in places that perhaps it is not.  And I know that it was possible for Calvino . . . no, for my friend Italo to have written what he did--not because it's specific to me, but because it is common to all humans.  But I can perhaps be forgiven for taking these moments of religious experience to heart, and allowing myself to be reassured that I not only exist and am whole, but that someone, even if he's been dead for thirty years, cares.