I enjoyed Italo Calvino’s “Why Read the Classics?” a lot, because I could easily understand what he was trying to explain throughout it. I loved how he had an explanation for each of the fourteen definitions he had for the word classics. My favorite of the definitions was the first one, “The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading…’” (Calvino 3). In that one definition I can see that it is a lot better to reread classics instead of tossing them aside after one time. Also, “A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers,” is a great definition that I found appealing. It is a very true statement because classics, as stated by him, are different each time we read them. “Reading a classic must also surprise us, when we compare it to the image we previously had of it.” (Calvino 5). Every time we read a classic, whether it’s the second, third, or fourth, etc. time, we come at it knowing what it will be about. After reading it, we will find new things about it that we never noticed before that will affect our lives. Those were only two of the many things I found appealing about this essay.
No comments:
Post a Comment