Terra Amata

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You’ve opened the book at this page. You’ve turned over two or three pages, glancing idly at the title, the name of the author, the publisher, and perhaps you’ve looked for the phrase in quotation marks that’s nearly always to be found at the beginning of novels because it looks well and the author covers himself to a certain extent by referring to someone more important than he is. In this case the phrase might have been: ‘I am one of you, a grain, one of you … Shining … Vibrating … Burning …’ I was in the Bibliothèque Nationale one day and a woman of about fifty with a rabbit’s-fur hat on came up to the table where I was sitting, held her hand out shyly, and said, ‘I’ m Maria Michal-owicz … Perhaps … These poems …’ They were very good poems, and if I’d quoted anything at all I’d have been glad to quote a line from one of them.

But to continue: you’ve opened the book. You bought it in a bookshop, or someone gave it to you as a present, perhaps a birthday present. Why this book rather than another? There are so many novels in the bookshops, so many love-stories, detective-stories, adventures, thrillers. There are so many intriguing titles, so many books that are all the rage, with pictures and conversation and psychology on every page. Sometimes they have such lovely titles—A Scent of Pines, Dum-dum Symphony, Say it with Prunes! The Praying Mantis—such lovely titles, and the names of strange, mysterious cities: Manila, Hongkong, Arequipa, Tokyo, Reykjavik, Vladivostock, and so on. And such beautiful dust-jackets: a pretty girl without any clothes on holding a revolver, or stretching out her arms to embrace you. There are so many interesting books, so much crime and violence and exoticism and eroticism. So why this book?

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