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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The library’s worst enemy is the employed student; its best friend is Thomas Jefferson, someone who has a large personal library and therefore no need to visit the public library (to which he may nevertheless bequeath his books at his death).
Swimming in an oil-polluted sea increases the risk of contagion, because the oil droplets transport particles of saliva from other swimmers, who have previously swallowed the polluted liquid and spat it out.
Anyone who smokes more than eighty Gauloises a day touches—with fingers that have touched other things—the upper part of all those cigarettes, and the germs enter the respiratory channels.
Avoid being fired from your job, because you then spend the day chew...
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Take care not to be kidnapped by Sardinian shepherds or by terrorists: the kidnappers as a rule use the same ...
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Never travel by train between Florence and Bologna, as terrorist explosions in the confined area of the tunnels spread organic detritus very quickly, and in such moments o...
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Avoid areas subject to bombardment by nuclear warheads: faced with the sight of a mushroom cloud, the spectator has an instinctive tendency to put his (unwashed)...
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I have a firm destination, the station magazine stand where I have seen a cheap paperback edition, no longer new, of a story, translated from the French, that looks fascinating. It costs one lira, and I have exactly one lira in my pocket. Shall I buy it, or not? The other shops are closed, or seem to be. My friends are on vacation. Alessandria is only space, sun, a track for my bike with its pocked tires; the little book at the station is the only hope of narrative, and hence of reality.
(Many years later I would have a kind of intermittence du coeur, a short circuit between memory and present image, landing in a wobbling plane in the center of Brazil, at’Sâo Jesus da Lapa. The plane couldn’t land because two sleepy dogs were stretched out in the middle of the cement runway, and they wouldn’t move. What is the connection? None. This is how epiphanies work.)
To end the story, if you want me to, I finally made up my mind and bought the little book. As I recall, it was an imitation of the Atlantide of Pierre Benoît, but with an extra dash of Verne. As the sun set, I was shut up in the house, but I had already left Alessandria, I was navigating on the bed of silent seas, I was witnessing other sunsets and other horizons. My father, coming home, remarked that I read too much and said to my mother that I should spend more time outdoors. But, on the contrary, I was curing myself of the excess of space.
The Alessandrian distrusts diabolical stratagems, but he is very indulgent towards chance.
If you leaf through the opening pages of the Guide to the Italy of Legend and Fantasy, where a series of charts illustrates the distribution of fantastic beings in the provinces of northern Italy, you will see that the province of Alessandria stands out thanks to its virginity.
It has no witches, devils, fairies, sprites, mages, monsters, ghosts, caves, labyrinths, or buried treasure, saving its reputation thanks only to one “bizarre construction.” You have to admit that’s pretty slim pickings.
