Why Read the Classics?

Italo Calvino was the Scheherezade of novelists. Endlessly inventive, suspenseful, and exotic, he refused to tie things up and conclude. Reading Calvino, we are like his Mr. Palomar swimming after the sun's reflection on the water: "At every stroke of his, it retreats, and never allows him to overtake it." Instead, "The swimming ego of Mr. Palom