"At times I am gripped by an absurd desire: that the sentence I am about to write be the one the woman is reading at that same moment. The idea mesmerizes me so much that convince myself it is true: I write the sentence hastily, get up, go to the window, train my spyglass to check the effect of my sentence in her gaze, in the curl of her lips, in the cigarette she lights, in the shifts of her body across the deck chair, in her legs, which she crosses or extends.

At times it seems to me that the distance between my writing and her reading is unbridgeable, that whatever I write bears the stamp of artifice and incongruity; if what I am writing were to appear on the polished surface of the page she is reading, it would rasp like a fingernail on a pane, and she would throw the book away with horror.

At times I convince myself that the woman is reading my true book, the one I should have written long ago, but will never succeed in writing, that this book is there, word for word, that I can see it at the end of my spyglass but cannot read what is written in it, cannot know what was written by that me who I have not succeeded and will never succeed in being. It's no use my sitting down again at the desk, straining to guess, to copy that true book of mine she is reading: whatever I may write will be false, a fake, compared to my true book, which no one except her will ever read.

And just as I watch her while she reads, suppose she were to train a spyglass on me while I write? I sit at the desk with my back to the window, and there, behind me, I feel an eye that sucks up the flow of sentences, leads the story in directions that elude me. Readers are my vampires. I feel a throng of readers looking over my shoulder and seizing the words as they are set down on paper. I am unable to write if there is someone watching me: I feel that what I am writing does not belong to me anymore. I would like to vanish, to leave behind for that expectation lurking in their eyes the page stuck in the typewriter, or at most, my fingers striking the keys.

How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person!

If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes... Who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know. It is no in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to transmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells...

At times I think of the subject matter of the book to be written as of something that already exists: thoughts already thought, dialogue already spoken, stories already happened, places and settings seen; the book should be simply the equivalent of the unwritten world translated into writing. At other times, on the contrary, I seem to understand that between the book to be written and things that already exist there can be only a kind of complementary relationship: the book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.

I see that one way or another I keep circling around the idea of an interdependence between the unwritten world and the book I should write. This is why writing presents itself to me as an operation of such weight that I remain crushed by it. I put my eye to the spyglass and train it on the reader. Between her eyes and the page a white butterfly flutters. Whatever she may have been reading, now it is certainly the butterfly that has captured her attention. The unwritten world has its climax in that butterfly. The result at which I must aim is something specific, intimate, light."

Italo Calvino