un po' di Calvino per favore

I was reading Italo Calvino's invisible cities taken from the shelf at a friend's house early one saturday morning. Lying on the sofa bed having eaten through the last train, listening to the breathing of the friend's sister, my best friend sleeping under the other quilt, we dozed through occasional cars and the sounds of children beginning to bounce around excitedly next door.

Gradually I felt my eyelids dropping and my left hand which was holding the book was growing nearer. I decided to drift off with the book open on my face and see if I could soak up some of the lines for inspiration, if the files of characters would begin to peel up and off the page and wind and snake around the side of my head, insinuate themselves across my cheeks and up under eyelids and into nostrils and round and inside the ears and into my mouth as I slept.

When I next came to my thumb was still on the page I'd been holding open. I would have liked it to be exactly on the point where it was written 'the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites'gnawing' or 'Desires are already memories' or 'every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls', but I didn't look, just closed the book and laid it on the floor and turned back on to my left and went to sleep thinking of words.