Maria Popova’s essay explores Italo Calvino’s wonderfully sensual idea that reading and lovemaking are variations of the same intimate act: two separate selves attempting to understand, enter, and transform one another.

Drawing from Calvino’s 1979 novel If on a winter’s night a traveler, Popova begins with the observation that neither stories nor relationships have tidy beginnings. Every book opens in the middle of something, just as every lover arrives carrying an unseen library of memories, habits, wounds, desires, and previous encounters.

For Calvino, intimacy becomes a kind of reading. We interpret another person through touch, expression, laughter, hesitation, appetite, memory, and countless small details—those “poor alphabets” through which one human being tries to comprehend another. Sometimes we read closely; sometimes we skim, linger, reread, lose our place, or become unexpectedly captivated by a seemingly insignificant detail.

But this reading is not linear. It loops, pauses, repeats, accelerates, wanders, and occasionally gets lost. Although physical intimacy may seem to move toward a climax, Calvino suggests that its deeper meaning lies in the strange private dimension it creates: a time and space outside ordinary measurement, where experience becomes unrepeatable.

The essay’s most important insight is that genuine intimacy does not require two people to dissolve into one. Even at the moment of greatest union, each remains a complete and distinct self. Love’s beauty lies in this paradox: we become most profoundly connected not by erasing our separateness, but by bringing our whole selves—our entire histories, imaginations, and bodies—to the encounter.

In short: we read the way we love, and we love the way we read—curiously, imperfectly, hungrily, always hoping that another person might open a world we could never have entered alone.

Read “Italo Calvino on Reading and Sex” at The Marginalian