Trafika Europe 14 - Italian Piazza

A Perfect Idiot

my way not only to fake working and stick to it, but also to be in the world, or at least to be in it in a meaningful way. Don Vito cal led me, he must have concluded that I’d ruminated enough about my l ife, and led me inside the l ibrary. The students were sitting on the l ittle wal ls around the courtyard, chatting about banal topics. The l ibrary was on the right, right after the main entrance. In front of us were the study rooms ful l of heads bent over newspapers and books and, outside the window, the wet ivy lazi ly waking up. ● In a l ittle apartment in the Segrate zone. Mel i and her aunt remembered her high school years and fantasized about the directions her l ife might have taken if she’d made other choices. “If I hadn’t returned to Marsei l le, if I’d remained here with you in Mi lan,” and so forth. “You’re fascinated by this l ibrary job, right?” she asked her. “You’ve always loved books.” “Books and everything inside them,” her aunt answered. “For me, loving books means loving l ife itself. It ’s as though I might find inside each one of them a piece of my existence, the fragments that need to be put back together, a kind of analysis that the authors, without knowing me, subject me to and that I, in turn, subject them to.”

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