“…And on top of that, we were always bumping against the Z’zu family’s household goods: camp beds, mattresses, baskets; these Z’zus, if you weren’t careful, with the excuse that they were a large family, would begin to act as if they were the only ones in the world: they even wanted to hang lines across our point to dry their washing.
“But the others also had wronged the Z’zus, to begin with, by calling them ‘immigrants,’ on the pretext that, since the others had been there first, the Z’zus had come later. This was mere unfounded prejudice–that seems obvious to me–because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of ‘immigrant’ could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time.
“It was what you might call a narrow-minded attitude, our outlook at that time, very petty. The fault of the environment in which we had been reared. An attitude that, basically, has remained in all of us, mind you: it keeps cropping up even today, if two of us happen to meet–at the bus stop, in a movie house, at an international dentists’ convention–and start reminiscing about the old days….”
from “All at One Point” in Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino (tr. William Weaver)