Hermit in Paris by Italo Calvino Read Free Book Online Page A

Exchange and it is certainly a grand sight but one which we already know well from the cinema. But this Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith is some place: it is a pity I am now too old, but something your children should do first thing is to work with them for a while to learn the trade (there is an enormous students’ office): send them for an apprenticeship with Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, then they can learn philosophy, music, and all the rest, but first of all a man has to know how to work Wall Street. They also do a huge amount of propaganda for investments, with brochures based on the principle that money breeds money, with maxims about money by the great philosophers, and this propaganda for the cult of money is constant in America: if by chance a generation grows up that does not put money above all else, America will go up in smoke.
    Now, however, at Columbia University I have met Mario Salvadori, scientist and mathematician, who was with Fermi in the team that worked on the atom bomb: he seems a first-class person, and he says that that 705 is nothing and he will take me to see real electronic brains.
    New York Diary
    24 Nov.
    The Girls’ College
    Yesterday I was invited by Mark Slonim (the most famous expert on Russian literature in America, and he also teaches Italian: I had met him in Rome) to the Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville where he teaches comparative literature. Sarah Lawrence College is a very chic girls’ college, where each girl chooses the course she wants, there are no lectures just discussions, no exams, in short everyone has a great time dealing with pleasant and varied cultural topics. Girls in trousers and big socks and multicoloured jerseys, just like in films about college life, flutter down from the buildings where they have their faculty rooms and dormitories. Lunch is very meagre because in any case the girls want to keep their figure (while the starving tutors protest). The students of Italian are waiting for me in the cafeteria: there are about twenty-five of them, of whom at least a couple are very good-looking. Their teacher tells me that they have prepared a surprise for me: they want to sing me a song; one has a guitar; I think it will be the predictable Neapolitan song or something Italian they have heard on the radio; instead they actually sing ‘Sul verde fiume Po’. 29 My surprise is beyond all their expectations. (I later learn that a record brought by the Momiglianos to America had ended up there.) The teacher explains that the song is very useful for learning verbs. The girls ask me questions about my short stories which they know off by heart. Then I go to the seminar on comparative literature: today we are discussing Alesha Karamazov. The girls give their opinion of Alesha, then Slonim intervenes, raising questions and directing the discussion, with great finesse and pedagogical effectiveness, but these young girls are surely as far from Dostoevsky as the moon. Seeing Dostoevsky and Russian religious and revolutionary thought skimming over that gathering of young heiresses in Westchester brings on the kind of astonishment and enthusiasm that would be provoked by a collision of planets. Then I go to the Italian lesson: today the girls have to do
La sera fiesolana
. They translate D’Annunzio’s lines with terrifying ease. The discussion turns to St Francis. And the teacher asks me to read his poem ‘Brother Sun, Sister Moon’. I read, translate and give a commentary on St Francis to the various Beths, Virginias, Joans. And since their teacher has dropped a timid hint that she prefers D’Annunzio, I rebel and produce a lengthy eulogy putting St Francis above all other poets. I realize that this is the first time since coming to America that I have explained anything or defended an idea. And it had to be St Francis. Very appropriate.
    The Guggenheim Museum
    In the last few weeks the obligatory topic of every New York conversation is the new museum