Harper's posted my favorite Italo Calvino quote from one of my most beloved books - Invisible Cities. Seeing the quote made me recall the many times I've come back to it for one reason or another. Like our search for that which is not the inferno, it continues to endure.
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for man: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
–Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili (1974), the final paragraph
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