There Are No Mosquitoes In Rome - None Worth Talking About.
It Is Well.
For mosquitoes have a deplorable habit of indulging in a
second meal, an early breakfast, at about four a.m. - a habit more
destructive to slumber than that regular and legitimate banquet of
theirs.
No mosquitoes, and few flies. It is well.
It is more than merely well. For the mosquito, after all, when properly
fed, goes to bed like a gentleman and leaves you alone, whereas that
insatiable and petty curiousness of the fly condemns you to a
never-ending succession of anguished reflex movements. What a
malediction are those flies; how repulsive in life and in death: not to
be touched by human hands! Their every gesture is an obscenity, a
calamity. Fascinated by the ultra-horrible, I have watched them for
hours on end, and one of the most cherished projects of my life is to
assemble, in a kind of anthology, all the invectives that have been
hurled since the beginning of literature against this loathly dirt-born
insect, this living carrion, this blot on the Creator's reputation - and
thereto add a few of my own. Lucian, the pleasant joker, takes the fly
under his protection. He says, among other things, that "like an honest
man, it is not ashamed to do in public what others only do in private."
I must say, if we all followed the fly's example in this aspect, life
would at last be worth living....
Morning sleep is out of the question, owing to the tram-cars whose
clangour, both here and in Florence, must be heard to be believed.
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