[Publib] Of Librarians

[Backwage at aol.com]

>From Primo Levi's book, The Periodic Table, a description of a  librarian 
found in a chemical laboratory and institute in Fascist Italy:
 
"The librarian, whom I had never seen before, presided over the library  like 
a watchdog, one of those poor dogs who are deliberately made vicious by  
being chained up and given little to eat; or better, like the old, toothless  
cobra, pale because of centuries of darkness, who guards the king's treasure in  
the Jungle Book.  Pagliettta, poor woman, was little less than a  lusus 
naturae:  she was small, without breasts or hips, waxen,  wilted, and monstrously 
myopic: she wore glasses so thick and concave that,  looking at her head-on, her 
eyes, light blue, almost white, seemed very far  away, stuck at the back of 
her cranium.  She gave the impression of never  having been young, although she 
was certainly not more than thirty, and of  having been born there, in the 
shadows, in that vague odor of mildew and stale  air.  Nobody knew anything about 
her, the commendatore himself talked about  her with irritated impatience, 
and Giulia admitted that she hated her  instinctively, without knowing why, 
without pity, as a fox hates a dog.   She said that she stank of mothballs and 
looked constipated."
 
[A lusus naturae would be a jest of nature; a sort of  freak.]
 
I just simply loved that description.  These days, women pay a lot of  money 
to look like that.  In the old days they came by it naturally.  
 
M. McGrorty
**************Hurry! April 15th is almost here. File your Federal taxes FREE 
with TaxACT. 
(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1220714320x1201367638/aol?redir=http:%2F%2Fwww.taxact.com%2F08tax.asp%3Fsc%3D084102950001%26p%3D82)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.webjunction.org/wjlists/publib/attachments/20090403/ba72942a/attachment.htm