The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor Von Rezzori

much greater intelligence but also pronounced talent and a sharper thirst for knowledge, I stayed much longer than usual in the world of childhood in which Cassandra was the most constant and direct influence. Cassandra herself was of course illiterate, and if, ultimately, she was able laboriously to form the letters of her own name, she owed this to my own and our shared efforts to penetrate the secrets of the alphabet. At first, neither of us got very far in this endeavor, and when finally I outdistanced her, she gave it up altogether and without regret. Meanwhile I owed her a much more valuable piece of knowledge than I ever owed later to my despairing teachers. It came to me out of Cassandra’s attitude toward the written word.
    Cassandra was not one of those semiprimitives who are haunted by hundreds of superstitions but take for real only what they can see with their eyes and grasp with their hands, and for whom any writing belongs to a phony world created by pettifogging lawyers, in which every word is twisted and turned around topsy-turvy as if by sleight of hand. That may be how the dim-witted people of her home village thought. But Cassandra’s superstitious awe of the reality of letters, and her ultimate and voluntary rejection of their decipherment, originated in a much more archaic insight. The serried rows of books on the shelves of my father’s library were truly demonic for her. That certain things had been recorded between the covers of these books which could be grasped mentally and transformed into speech and knowledge by initiates in the shamanic craft of coding and decoding those runic symbols—this could be understood only as a supernatural phenomenon. It irritated her to see that we had lost the sense of its terrifying uncanniness and that reading was an everyday custom, publicly performed, nay, that it could even become a vice, as exemplified by my sister. With the instinctive certainty of the creature being, she felt that such casual handling of the irrational was bound in turn to generate irrationality.
    She realized that for those who had acquired it, the ability to read conferred power over those to whom the written or printed word remained a sealed mystery. But she also knew that this was a power pertaining to black magic—that it turns against its own practitioners and transforms them into slaves of the abstract. She saw in it a truly devilish power, since its manipulators, who also were its most immediate victims, were not even aware of its nefarious effects. To be sure, she was unable to say what was meant by the abstract and, even less, in what consisted its peril. Yet she carried within her innermost self—not only since she had left the monastery, where, on the walls of the church, the angels, devils and saints, as well as the tormented or redeemed bodies of the mortals, together with the beatitudes of heaven and the torments of hell were most wondrously and graphically depicted in ocher, red, blue and gold—she carried from her very beginning the clear and unshakable conviction that anything supernatural that does not lead directly to God and His heavenly kingdom must bring about a downfall into damnation. Books were either sacred or devilish, and since almost all books could be interpreted either way, they also could have both holy and diabolic effects. It seemed to her that with the opening of the covers of a book both the gates of heaven and the jaws of hell were being unlocked, and the angel or devil who then emerged from its pages separated the questing spirits according to either their longing for the one and only truth or their susceptibility to devilish, pernicious lies. To expose oneself to such a momentous decision in trite everyday circumstances seemed to her downright sacrilegious. And from that she protected me.
    My father’s infatuation with my sister, his loving understanding of her fancies and moods, the constant interest he devoted to all her