“And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed, and crammed—as space was then—with isolated corpuscles, surrounded by emptiness, containing no destination or meaning. And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time where the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines….”

—  Italo Calvino , book Cosmicomics

Pages 92-93, "How Much Shall We Bet?"
Cosmicomics (1965)

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Italo Calvino 44
Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels 1923–1985

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