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Reading Pavese's diaries: The illusion the
book [eg, a novel] offers is that it can represent
time moving faster than it does, that we
could skip over events and get an overview.
What this neglects, and the diary form restores, is
that the insight *is* the event, par excellence,
in the best literary sense. The book [the novel]
ignores the philosophical basic tenet that
knowledge of the truth, and the gaining of that
knowledge constitutes a valuable kind of
condensing that the "sequence of events leading
up to it" obviates in their importance. *This*
event marks a new *order*
of events- on a certain plane.

Perhaps Pavese was a kind of *backwards*
person in that he ended his biological life at precisely
the time that a certain mythical (fictional or
poetical) figure dissolved of itself.