A Room With A View

by E.M. Forster

IT WAS PLEASANT TO WAKE up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.

“A smell! a true Florentine smell! Every city, let me teach you, has its own smell.” “Is it a very nice smell?” said Lucy, who had inherited from her mother a distaste to dirt.

“One doesn’t come to Italy for niceness,” was the retort; “one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!” bowing right and left. “Look at that adorable wine-cart! How the driver stares at us, dear, simple soul!”

It was the hour of unreality—the hour, that is, when unfamiliar things are real.

This solitude oppressed her; she was accustomed to have her thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted; it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.

The river was a lion that morning in strength, voice, and colour.

The well-known world had broken up, and there emerged Florence, a magic city where people thought and did the most extraordinary things.

Do you suppose there’s any difference between Spring in nature and Spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.”

At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.

Of course, he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.