Saying one thing through another, without a word of comparison: instead of saying that something is like another thing, one says that it is. The image transfers to the subject the qualities of the thing it has been identified with.
In One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand
But what fault is it of ours, yours and mine, if words in themselves are empty? Empty, my dear. And you fill them with your meaning when you say them to me; and I, on receiving them, inevitably fill them with mine. We think we understand each other, and we do not understand each other at all.
Saying that words are "empty" and that each person "fills" them with his own meaning makes the word a vessel. The image explains why the same language can serve two different meanings without anyone noticing.
But of course she knew that Gengè of hers better than I did! She had built him! And he was by no means a puppet. If anyone was one, the puppet was me.
Book II: The reader and the house, Vitangelo Moscarda, on understanding what his wife called Gengè
It was a moment, but an eternity. I felt within me all the dread of blind necessities, of things that cannot be changed: the prison of time; being born now, and not before or after; the name and the body given to us; the chain of causes.
Book III: The father and the one hundred thousand, Vitangelo Moscarda, facing his father's vision
Apart from every image in which I could picture myself alive to myself, as someone for myself too, apart from every image of myself as I imagined I might be to others, a “vital point” in me had felt itself wounded so deeply that I lost the light of my eyes.
Stop it with your Gengè, which is not me, not me, not me! Enough of that puppet! I want what I want; and it will be done as I want it!
Book V: The vital point, Vitangelo Moscarda to Dida, after grabbing her by the wrists
That vital point that had felt itself wounded in me, when my wife laughed on hearing me say that I no longer wanted to be counted as a usurer in Richieri, was God, beyond any doubt: God, who had felt himself wounded in me, God, who in me could no longer bear that others, in Richieri, should count me as a usurer.
You can only know yourself by posing: a statue, not alive. When someone lives, he lives and does not see himself. To know oneself is to die. You spend so much time looking at yourself in that mirror, in all mirrors, because you do not live; you do not know how, cannot, or do not want to live. You want too much to know yourself, and you do not live.
Book VII: The revolver and the bishop, Vitangelo Moscarda to Anna Rosa, in her room
Ah, the one about the great current, Your Honor! You channeled it well into your affections, into the duties you imposed on yourself, into the habits you laid down; but then come the moments of flood, Your Honor, and the current overflows, overflows, and sweeps everything away. I know. Everything submerged, for me, Your Honor! I threw myself into it, and now I swim, I swim. And I am, if you only knew, already so far away! I can barely see you anymore.
No name. No memory, today, of yesterday's name; of today's name, tomorrow. [...] It is nothing other than this, an epitaph, a name.
I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow a book or the wind: the book I read, the wind I drink. All outside, a vagabond.
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