In the summer of 1981, the novelist Italo Calvino published an article on the great books in the Roman weekly news magazine L’Espresso. “Why Read the Classics?” is classic Calvino: playful, charming, erudite, skeptical, humane. It consists of fourteen “suggested definitions” of a classic that deliberately contradict each other. Per definition one, the classics are books you are always rereading, even if you are discovering them for the first time, per definition five; or they are books you have yet to read because you are still waiting for the opportune conditions to enjoy them, per definition two. Classics are pre-selected for us by the group: “they come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture” (definition seven), they generate “a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse” (definition eight), and are often known through “hearsay” before they are known by experience (definition nine). But they are also chosen by the individual reader for personal reasons: “‘your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent” (definition eleven). Ancient or modern, a classic is a book that “relegates the noise of the present to a background hum” (definition thirteen) and at the same time one that “persists as background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway” (definition fourteen).
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