Yoyobon,
I don't have a classic to offer but I must comment on your "ability" to split hairs over a simple sentence that "most" people would argue has a perfectly clear meaning. I often recognize this type of vagueness and "most" people tell me I am being way too picky, and, of course, the meaning is obvious. Glad to meet you! I love clear, concise prose and respect writers who manage to avoid ambiguity ;-)
Nancy

Mudlady......

Clear as mud !

Do you think that Calvino means that a classic remains by it's nature , in message, unfinished?
Or do you think that Calvino means that the message of a classic is acutely relevant even today?

I didn't mean to split hairs over a simple sentence, but wanted others input regarding that statement and classics that they've read that relate to it !

As the esteemed Roseanne Rosannadanna would offer: "Never mind !"

Yoyobon,
All I meant is that the way my mind works (a little Asperger's) I read that sentence as ambiguous. When I worked as a nurse and was a union steward I always checked the wording of any new contract to find examples like this because I knew that sometime, a person who could confound the meaning of a sentence that most people found clear, would file a grievence and insist that the intended meaning was ambiguous. Sometimes they won. I love the line in the country music song that asks, "If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?" As I said, my brain is always slightly weird, by "normal" peoples' standards because I am a high functioning Asperger person.
Nancy

Yvonne, I like the Calvino quote. That a classic transcends time is a given, but I think he is also noting that a classic doesn't stop influencing us when we finish reading. We continue to reflect on what the writer showed us, and as we gather life experience we see more in that classic. JMHO

Calvino is also known for his droll wit and irony.
It is so bizarre....many years ago I was quite interested in a book he'd written, IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER.
It was such a strange title. I never bothered to find a copy or read it. Then this morning, Calvino revisits me with this quote !
Now I shall definitely find that book and read it.
The review of it is quite interesting...a strange book at best.

" On a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration--"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.
The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches--stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition--with explorations of how and why we read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."

Review
âÂÂ[Italo Calvino is] one of the worldâÂÂs best fabulists.âÂÂ
�"John Gardner, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

âÂÂCalvino is a wizard.âÂÂ
�"Mary McCarthy, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

âÂÂ[Calvino] manages to charm and entertain the reader in the teeth of a scheme designed to frustrate all reasonable readerly expectations.âÂÂ
�"John Updike, THE NEW YORKER

âÂÂCalvino is that very rare phenomenon, a true original . . . If on a winterâÂÂs night a traveler is breathtakingly complex and self-conscious (there are moments when it quite literally makes one gasp with astonishment) . . . [yet it] is one of the most accessible and enchanting novels written in the last fifty years.âÂÂ
�"from the Introduction by Peter Washington

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler... is among my favorites, but I don't recommend reading too much about it before you read it. Come fresh with no expectations.

To me, the meaning is that the message of a classic remains acutely relevant through the passage of time. For instance, I consider To Kill a Mockingbird a modern classic; and I can't see that its message will ever become irrelevant. Even Don Quixote, which some of my English Lit classmates found excruciatingly boring, lives on in Man of La Mancha and the cliche "tilting at windmills."

We will always come back to it, read it yet again and always find something more that we hadn't noticed before. Like a good poem.

I found that sentence to be a bit of a conundrum. It must have been intended to be unclear, therefore, I think it was intended to imply that a classic book has more to say than what first seems obvious. People go on thinking about it and talking about it. A really good piece of art is like that also. There is more than one interpetation of its message.

Apparently Calvino enjoyed wit and irony in his writing...and perhaps this statement is evidence of that.

yoyobon and mendicino rose, I agree that Calvino was being purposefully ambiguous. IMO, subtlety, nuance and, yes, ambiguity are what makes us readers return to the "classic" books over and over. The beauty of the classics is they are never static; they change with the times, the reader and the reader's age. They never quite give the complete answer to whatever dilemma is involved. If they did, there would be no reason to re-read them and they would not be classics!

I've got friends who never finish saying what they want to say...I've even been accused of it myself. It's certainly not a compliment in that sense!

But I like the quote - the implication that you can re-read a classic and find something new in it every time you read it.

And here is yet another small ambiguity to tease out - is he saying that a classic always has something more to say - or is he saying that a book which always has something more to say is, by definition, a classic?

I agree w/ dido1. ... To me that quote means that the meaning (and a great book can have lots of them!) of a classic goes on and on -- you can get deeper and deeper into it. Truth transcends time, fashion, events, current opinion.

Of course, as you move through life experiencing the world and people, you'll find more meaning each time you go back to that classic book.

It amazes me that having others express their feeling about a certain thing or quote or whatever, gives it much more of a three-dimensional appearance. Each person's view of a matter adds to the understanding of it and sort of rounds it out and makes it more complete.

Incidentally, I have always found that every re-reading of Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince reveals some new insight or truth that I had not noted before. It is so simple on the surface but runs deep.

Froniga,
It's like we all have a very small piece to share from a very big puzzle.
When many thoughts and perspectives are shared, we see the whole more clearly.

Yvonne

Yvonne, what you say seems to apply to our knowledge, understanding, and, appreciation of other people, also.

C.S. Lewis said, on the death of Charles Wilson, one of the Inklings, "In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald's (Tolkien's) reaction to a specifically Charles joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him "to myself" now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald..."

Mary

Froniga, what a lovely quote from C.S. Lewis, and how true! And I completely concur with your opinion of "Le Petit Prince", which I recently re-read, after a hiatus of some 35 years!