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 anyon… - Italo Calvino

That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit’s thread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.

So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.

إنه ينبغي علينا أن نخصص في فترة النضج وقتًا لإعادة اكتشاف أهم قراءاتنا التي قمنا بها في الصبا. فإذا كانت الكتب لا تتغير -وهي في الواقع تتغير علي ضوء منظور تاريخي مختلف- فنحن أنفسنا تغيرنا ولقاؤنا الجديد يشكل أحداثًا جديدة.ولهذا فإن كل قراءة جديدة لعمل كلاسيكي هي اكتشاف، مثلها مثل القراءة الأولي. وكل قراءة أولى لعمل كلاسيكي هي في الحقيقة قراءة جديدة.