Night Is Quiet Here, Save For The
Squeakings Of Some Strange Animals In The Upper Regions Of The
Neighbouring Pantheon; They Squeak Night And Day, And One Would Take
Them To Be Bats, Were It Not That Bats Are Supposed To Be On The Wing
After Sunset.
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. They
are fast rendering these towns uninhabitable. Can folks who cherish a
nuisance of this magnitude compare themselves, in point of refinement,
with those old Hellenic colonists who banished all noises from their
city? Nevermore! Why this din, this blocking of the roadways and general
unseemliness? In order that a few bourgeois may be saved the trouble of
using their legs. And yet we actually pride ourselves on these
detestable things, as if they were inventions to our credit. "We made
them," we say. Did we? It is not we who make them. It is they who make
us, who give us our habits of mind and body, our very thoughts; it is
these mechanical monsters who control our fates and drive us along
whither they mean us to go. We are caught in their cog-wheels - in a
process as inevitable as the revolution of the planets. No use lamenting
a cosmic phenomenon! Were it otherwise, I should certainly mope myself
into a green melancholy over the fact, the most dismal fact on earth,
that brachycephalism is a Mendelian dominant. [19] No use lamenting.
True.
But the sage will reserve to himself the right of cursing. Those morning
hours, therefore, when I would gladly sleep but for the tram-car
shrieking below, are devoted to the malediction of all modern progress,
wherein I include, with fine impartiality, every single advancement in
culture which happens to lie between my present state and that
comfortable cavern in whose shelter I soon see myself ensconced as of
yore, peacefully sucking somebody's marrow while my women, round the
corner, are collecting a handful of acorns for my dessert.... The
telephone, that diabolic invention! It might vex a man if his neighbour
possessed a telephone and he none; how would it be, if neither of them
had it? We can hardly realise, now, the blissful quietude of the
pre-telephone epoch. And the telegraph and the press! They have huddled
mankind together into undignified and unhygienic proximity; we seem to
be breathing each other's air. We know what everybody is doing, in every
corner of the earth; we are told what to think, and to say, and to do.
Your paterfamilias, in pre-telegraph days, used to hammer out a few
solid opinions of his own on matters political and otherwise. He no
longer employs his brain for that purpose. He need only open his morning
paper and in it pours - the oracle of the press, that manufactory of
synthetic fustian, whose main object consists in accustoming humanity to
attach importance to the wrong things. It furnishes him with opinions
ready made, overnight, by some Fleet Street hack at so much a column,
after a little talk with his fellows over a pint of bad beer at the
Press Club. He has been told what to say - yesterday, for instance, it
was some lurid balderdash about a steam-roller and how the Kaiser is to
be fed on dog biscuits at Saint Helena - he has been "doped" by the
editor, who gets the tip - and out he goes! unless he take it - from the
owner, who is waiting for a certain emolument from this or that caucus,
and trims his convictions to their taste. That is what the Press can do.
It vitiates our mundane values. It enables a gang to fool the country.
It cretinises the public mind. The time may come when no respectable
person will be seen touching a daily, save on the sly. Newspaper reading
will become a secret vice. As such, I fear, its popularity is not likely
to wane. Having generated, by means of sundry trite reflections of this
nature, an enviable appetite for breakfast, I dress and step out of
doors to where, at a pleasant table, I can imbibe some coffee and make
my plans for loafing through the day.
Hot, these morning hours. Shadeless the streets. The Greeks, the Romans,
the Orientals knew better than to build wide roadways in a land of
sunshine.
There exists an old book or pamphlet entitled "Napoli senza
sole" - Naples without sun.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 52 of 77
Words from 51746 to 52747
of 77809
