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realize how the fate of those two had influenced mine until a few years ago when the owner mentioned it in passing. He hadn’t thought for a moment that I could do the job. He credited my success to his diligent training. I worked for the paperback dilettante for fifty years, and mine was the only face anyone associated with my bookstore. That huge, darkly stained oak desk I once longed for now sits comfortably in my reading room, behind it a window letting in early evening darkness, and next to it my overfilled bookcases. When the owner, my boss, died four years ago,
translation activity is useless. Yet I persist. The world goes on whether I do what I do. Whether we find Walter Benjamin’s lost suitcase, civilization
translate books with my invented system because it makes time flow more gently. That’s the primary reason, I think. As Camus said in The Fall: “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”
admit that being different from normal people was what I desperately sought? I wanted to be special. I was already different: tall, not attractive and all. Mine is a face that would have trouble launching a canoe. I knew that no one would love me, so I strove to be respected, to be looked up to. I wanted people to think I was better than they were. I wanted to be Miss Jean Brodie’s crème de la crème.
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