cold memories

venerdì 2 novembre 2012

"In the big untidy kitchen there was a drawer. Of course, there were many drawers, but when someone said, ‘The string is in the drawer,’ everyone understood. The chances were the string would not be in the drawer. It was meant to be, along with a dozen other useful things that were never there: screwdrivers, scissors, sticky tape, drawing pins, pencils. If you wanted one of these, you looked in the drawer first, then you looked everywhere else. What was in the drawer was very hard to define: things that had no natural place, things that had no use but did not deserve to be thrown away, things that might be mended one day. So – batteries that still had a little life, nuts without their bolts, the handle of a precious teapot, a padlock without a key or a combination lock whose secret number was a secret to everyone, the dullest kind of marbles, foreign coins, a torch without a bulb, a single glove from a pair lovingly knitted by Granny before she died, a hot water bottle stopper, a cracked fossil. By some magic reversal, everything spectacularly useless filled the drawer intended for practical tools. What could you do with a single piece of jigsaw? But, n the other hand, did you dare throw it away?"

Ian McEwan, The daydreamer

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