dante couldn’t have just invented these founding principles of rock climbing

Highlights from the New Yorker winter fiction issue...

Fiction from Marguerite Duras...

The first night he talked to her about Islam. The next day he slept with her and he talked to her about the Bible. He asked her whether she’d read it. She told him that she hadn’t. The following day, he brought a Bible with him and he read Ecclesiastes to her in the back room of the Relais. He read it loudly, his hands on his ears, in a passionate voice, following a liturgical rhythm. She was embarrassed by this and she wondered whether he wasn’t a little crazy. Afterward, he asked her what she’d thought of it. She hadn’t listened very carefully while he was reading because she was so embarrassed by it. She told him that it seemed reasonable to her, that it was fine. He smiled at her response; he explained that it was a fundamental text and that it was necessary to learn it.

...and Primo Levi:

After we had eaten, we started to drink. Wine is a more complex substance than one might think, and, above two thousand metres, and at close to zero degrees centigrade, it displays interesting behavioral anomalies. It changes flavor, loses the bite of alcohol, and regains the mildness of the grape from which it comes. One can take it in heavy doses without any undesired effects. In fact, it eliminates fatigue, loosens and warms the limbs, and leads to a fanciful mood. It is no longer a luxury or a vice but a metabolic necessity, like water on the plains. It is a well-known fact that vines grow better on a slope: could there be a connection?

Once we started drinking, the conversation at our table became much less impersonal. Each of us spoke of our initiation, and we established with some surprise that we had all begun our mountaineering careers with an extremely foolish act.

The print issue might be worth picking up for Milan Kundera "on world literature and how we read one another."
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