Ancient Books

By Srianee (Bunter) Fernando Dias

                                       Ancient Books

Some of you know that I have been hunting for my father’s collection of P.G. Wodehouse books in Colombo.  Sadly, the trail came to a dead end when I found out that one of my brothers had lent several of the Penguin editions to a friend who never returned them.  The friend subsequently emigrated to the UK, and my brother lost track of him. (Perhaps I should put Speedy on the quest to track him down.) 

While searching for these gems, I stumbled across a very old edition of a collection of fourteen selected short stories by Aldous Huxley entitled “Twice Seven” published by the Reprint Society in 1944.  They are mostly deliciously satirical stories about late 19^th Century British society. There are philosophical digressions here and there, and I found them to be quite entertaining. Huxley wrote these at a time when he didn’t have to worry about being “politically correct.”  Women were thought to be “old” after age thirty. (It reminded me of Professor Sinnathamby predicting that all of us female medical students would be “Elderly Primaes”)  I thought I would share this amusing passage from a story entitled “Young Archimedes” describing an Italian woman.

“Her vitality, if you could have harnessed it and made it do some useful work, would have supplied a whole town with electric light.  The physicists talk of deriving energy from the atom; they would be more profitably employed nearer home – in discovering some way of tapping those enormous stores of vital energy which accumulate in unemployed women of sanguine temperament and which, in the present imperfect state of social and scientific organization, vent themselves in ways that are generally so deplorable: in interfering with other people’s affairs, in working up emotional scenes, in thinking about love and making it, and in bothering men till they cannot get on with their work.”