After frying some eggs and meatballs for dinner, drinking a cup of coffee, and smoking a cigarette, I sat down in the living room with a history book and started to read. The countryside had not yet emerged from the strange interlude between winter and spring when the fields are bare and wet, the sky is gray and the trees leafless, nothing in themselves, everything charged with what will be. Perhaps it has already started to happen, unseen in the darkness, for isn’t the air slowly warming up in the forest? Isn’t there scattered birdsong coming from the trees after these long months of silence,
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