Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness. - Italo Calvino

...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.

What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

"Every silence consists of the network of minuscule sounds that enfolds it."

- from "The Adventure of a Poet"