Today, mid-January, is not a cheerful day; cloudy skies, arrhythmias, the usual disorder that takes as long to become drinkable as a sardine to become a sperm whale. Obviously the sardine has turned me toward oil, and therefore Oil, and the ungrateful homeland, I won't give you the bones. Well, on a day like this, it's difficult to do the only thing I really know how to do: buy books. When spring unleashes itself, and the wild goats lasciviously roam the meadows, and the scent of myrtle—a herb I know nothing about, and which is therefore purely literary—enrichs the air, I go buy books. Mind you: I didn't say I'm going to buy books I've previously chosen, that I absolutely want, that, once purchased, I will eagerly take home and read, then write a marvelous critical essay, a splendor of acuity and secret poetry, destined to earn me letters from passionate readers, shocked and regenerated. Not at all. The only matter that matters to me is precisely this: buying books. Now, the question, the quaestio quodlibetalis, is as follows: is someone who buys books a reader? Obviously, the majority of readers of these lines, if there are any, will think no; a reader is someone who reads. What a mistake. There is no doubt that it is natural for a reader to read, but I dispute that to be a reader one must absolutely read; and above all, that buying books is not a reader's act. But if you don't read the book, what sense will there ever be in it sitting in your library? And you say it yourself: perhaps I will never read it, perhaps one day I will give it away. Oh no, you make me say this last joke. I don't even lend books I have bought unread, perhaps never read. They 'serve me'. They serve what purpose? They serve thanks to the natural, magical, shadowy, and stemmic activity that a book exerts. A book is bought with a mindset that I suppose is similar to that with which they were painted. oxen and goats in Paleolithic caves. A painted cow is neither milked nor eaten, but is 'the cow,' something no other cow is allowed to do. And so the unread book, purchased and placed on the shelves, is 'the book.' Buying a book has a nervous effect that no other gesture can have; it is a completely dreamlike, hysterical, fantastical choice, and it presupposes a life plan, and naturally multiple books can allude to multiple life plans.” —Giorgio Manganelli, Discorso dell'ombra e dello stemma