Thursday 's Key Ideas from Why Read the Classics?
by Italo Calvino

Humans spend their entire life running towards obsessions, perfection, something is not available to them because ther are simply...human. And finally they get destroyed by this "unreachable" that has a different meaning for every man. Like captain Achab, who died because of the big white whale, Moby Dick, his only purpose since the ship left Nuntacket's harbour.

He obsessively follow the whale to have his revenge (Moby Dick ate his leg during a previous hant), and he spent his entire life thinking about his revenge without living a real and full life.

-The white whale swam in front of his eyes like the obsessive incarnation of all those forces of evil by which certain profound men feel themselves being bitten into their very depths.

-But when we pursue those distant mysteries that we dream of, or torment ourselves in pursuit of that demonic ghost which sooner or later swims past all human hearts, when we thus hunt round this globe, those things bring us inside sterile labyrinths, or they leave us halfway, at the bottom.

-the pirates immediately turn away, because they are evil scoundrels on both sides, and they don't like to see their own mutual scoundrel too much. (This remind me the projection by Carl G. Just I wrote about a few days ago, it was my first publication)

Moby Dick, H. Melville

The old man and the sea, E. Hemingway

To the lighthouse, V. Woolf

Orlando,V. Woolf

1984, G. Orwell

Pride & Prejudice, J. Austen

Uno,Nessuno e Centomila, L. Pirandello

Il fu Mattia Pascal, L. Pirandello

Wuthering Heights, E. Brontë

Jane Eyre, C. Brontë