Free A Life by Italo Svevo Page B

cupboard—he spent reading . Generally he read serious works of criticism and philosophy , which he found less tiring than poetry or art. He also wrote, but very little; his style was not formed, and he felt thwarted by inappropriate words which never quite hit the target. He thought study would improve this. He was in no hurry, and the little he did was in accordance with a timetable which he had laid down for his own work. After being tired out by work at the bank and library, he would jot down a few concepts or a romantic dialogue with himself which no one else would ever hear. The odd thing about these was that in them he seemed to be suffering from some universal disease: never a hint of his real sufferings, of the nostalgia still torturing him. These writings were in the nature of rudimentary jottings which he hoped to use in some distant future for major works; plays, novels, verse.
    He had never yet read an Italian classic all through, and had only a haphazard knowledge of literary history and criticism. Later he plunged into reading German works of philosophy translated into French.
    Then he discovered the city library, and all those centuries of culture at his free disposal saved him a great deal from his meagre budget. He tied himself down to the library at fixed hours, which gave his studies the regularity he needed. Another reason for going there often was that his room at the Lanuccis’ was not good for study. It was small, half of it occupied by the bed, very dark, it was rarely touched by sun, and he found thinking neither pleasant nor easy at a small round table whose four legs never touched the floor at the same time.
    When he had managed to get through a day of this routine, he would go to the bank the next day, still tired, and work worse thanusual. Pending letters increased, and by evening he found himself facing a huge pile of correspondence from every town in Italy; the whole world seemed to be conspiring to impose this labour upon him.
    He made very few acquaintances in the library. He would enter the long reading-room filled with tables in parallel lines, take any seat and sit there for some time with his head in his hands, so absorbed in reading that he did not even see the people sitting beside him. After an hour at most this concentrated reading began to repel him, but he still forced himself to go on for a time and stopped only when his mind could no longer grasp the words seen by his eyes; then he handed in his book at once and left. After an hour spent with the German idealists everything in the street seemed to be calling out to him.

VII
    A LFONSO HAD COME to the city with a great contempt for its inhabitants; townspeople he considered bound to be physically weak and morally lax, and he despised what he considered to be their sexual habits, general womanizing and facile affairs. He could never be like them, he thought, and felt and, actually was, very different. Sensuality he had known only as an exalted emotion. To him a woman was man’s gentle companion born to be adored rather than embraced, and in the solitude of the country village where his body had grown to maturity he had vowed to keep himself pure until he could lay all of himself at the feet of some goddess. In the city this ideal had very soon lost any influence on his life, though it still remained a vague objective for which he felt no need to struggle.
    He held to it as a theory even after realizing that it seemed ridiculous to those to whom he explained it. He had no idea what to replace it with; its abandonment would have created a void in his life. But he no longer spoke of it, and Miceni was quite wrong in boasting of having converted him.
    At twenty-two his senses had the delicacy and weakness of an adolescent’s. He had desires which it was torture for him to repress. The sight or even the thought of a skirt, harsh mockery of his dream, was enough to provoke these desires; and they were strong enough to drag him suddenly