Mainly reviewing distance of the moon: https://genius.com/Italo-calvino-the-distance-of-the-moon-annotated

I distinctively remember hearing this story towards the end of high school, biking across the Han river in Seoul at night. I stumbled across it, through a Radiolab episode where Liev Schreiber narrates the story. The story, the night sky and the bright Seoul lights in the distance, and the solitude of the bike ride made me unforgettable memory for me.

Even though I read the rest of Cosmicomics, no other story really resonates as much as this one. Maybe it's because it touched that naïveté that I had back then about life. The reaching hand of desire, in concrete form. The weird setting, weird names, non-human characters and otherworldly settings, which I seemed to accept as reality for those 40 minutes. The grief, the jealousy, the loss and joy. Emotions foreign and familiar to us, melt into each other, creating this wonderful story.

The last paragraph:

My return was sweet, my home refound, but my thoughts were filled only with grief at having lost her, and my eyes gazed at the Moon, forever beyond my reach, as I sought her. And I saw her. She was there where I had left her, lying on a beach directly over our heads, and she said nothing. She was the color of the Moon; she held the harp at her side and moved one hand now and then in slow arpeggios. I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.

So gorgeous. Such luscious prose! Makes my heart melt. What a great story.