Bloglets are so much easier to write when you copy from a book

Evening all.

Bloglet number two in as many days. Aren't you the lucky ones?

Bit of a change from the usual rants for today's bloglet as I thought I'd bring some literature into the proceedings. A couple of days ago I started reading a book a friend gave me for Christmas (Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier) and yesterday I read a passage which made me smile. When I woke up this morning I was still thinking about it and so decided to share it with you.

I realise how horribly cheesy that sounds, but for some reason the passage struck a chord with me. Anyway, here it is:

It was years since he had been in the Spanish bookshop on  Hirschengraben. Once, every now and then, he had bought a book for Florence that she had needed for her dissertation on San Juan de la Cruz. On the bus, he had sometimes leafed through it, but at home he had never touched her books. Spanish - that was her territory. It was like Latin and yet completely different from Latin, and that bothered him. It went against the grain with him that words in which Latin was so evident came out of contemporary mouths - on the streets, in supermarkets, in cafes; that they were used to order Coke, to haggle and to curse. He found the idea hard to bear and brushed it quickly aside whenever it came to him. Naturally, the Romans had also haggled and cursed. But that was different. He loved the Latin sentences because they bore the calm of everything past. Because they didn't make you say something. Because they were speech beyond talk. And because they were beautiful in their immutability. Dead languages - people who talked about them like that had no idea, really no idea, and Gregorius could be harsh and unbending in his contempt for them. When Florence spoke Spanish on the phone, he had to close the door. That offended her and he couldn't explain why.