A Moby Dick Manifesto (Or, The Writing on the Whale) · 6:09pm June 23rd
In his 1981 essay Why Read the Classics?, Italo Calvino offers fourteen different definitions of the word ‘classic’. The first one, the one that opens the essay, reads:
1. A classic is one of those books about which you always hear “I’m re-reading…” and never “I’m reading…”