I opened this week's New Yorker to see Primo Levi, my favorite writer, by whom I've only read one book but a very good one, listed as an author. That book was/is
The Reawakening, his account of his journeyed miles right after leaving Auschwitz. It's not a downer as such, really, but a well told memoir. I'd have read the rest of his work already except that I buy cheap now from the good will, not the best selection. I did get
The Reawakining at a good used book store.
Egads and little fishes, this makes me happy: quoting the NYer author page -
Primo Levi, who died in 1987, wrote memoirs, poetry, essays, and works of fiction."
The Complete Works of Primo Levi, a three volume collection of all fourteen of Levi's books, will be published in September." I will have to spring for this one, though I'm not fond of reading big books in bed, so I may need to read those volumes at my desk, bummer.
I haven't read the whole article yet. I read part of it and nearly rolled over my desk in laughing joy at one part. Way past smiling..
then I had to go out and weed some more so I could settle down and stop chuckling.
The article -
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/08/quaestio-de-centauris
The part that got to me -
The centaurs’ origins are legendary, but the legends that they pass down among themselves are very different from the classical tales we know.
Remarkably, their traditions also refer to a Noah-like inventor and savior, a highly intelligent man they call Cutnofeset. But there were no centaurs on Cutnofeset’s ark. Nor, by the way, were there “seven pairs of every species of clean beast, and a pair of every species of the beasts that are not clean.” The centaurian tradition is more rational than the Biblical, holding that only the archetypal animals, the key species, were saved: man but not the monkey; the horse but not the donkey or the wild ass; the rooster and the crow but not the vulture or the hoopoe or the gyrfalcon.
How, then, did these species come about? Immediately afterward, the legend says. When the waters retreated, a deep layer of warm mud covered the earth. Now, this mud, which harbored in its decay all the enzymes from what had perished in the flood, was extraordinarily fertile: as soon as it was touched by the sun, it was covered with shoots from which grasses and plants of every type sprang forth; and, further, its soft, moist bosom was host to the marriages of all the species saved in the ark. It was a time, never to be repeated, of wild, ecstatic fecundity, in which the entire universe felt love, so intensely that it nearly returned to chaos.
Those were the days when the earth itself fornicated with the sky, when everything germinated and everything was fruitful. Not only every marriage but every union, every contact, every encounter, even fleeting, even between different species, even between beasts and stones, even between plants and stones, was fertile, and produced offspring not in a few months but in a few days. The sea of warm mud, which concealed the earth’s cold, prudish face, was one boundless nuptial bed, all its recesses boiling over with desire and teeming with jubilant germs.
This second creation was the true creation, because, according to what is passed down among the centaurs, there is no other way to explain certain similarities, certain convergences observed by all. Why is the dolphin similar to the fish, and yet gives birth and nurses its offspring? Because it’s the child of a tuna and a cow. Where do butterflies get their delicate colors and their ability to fly? They are the children of a flower and a fly. Tortoises are the children of a frog and a rock. Bats of an owl and a mouse. Conchs of a snail and a polished pebble. Hippopotami of a horse and a river. Vultures of a worm and an owl. And the big whales, the leviathans—how to explain their immense mass? Their wooden bones, their black and oily skin, and their fiery breath are living testimony to a venerable union in which—even when the end of all flesh had been decreed—that same primordial mud got greedy hold of the ark’s feminine keel, made of gopher wood and covered inside and out with shiny pitch.
Such was the origin of every form, whether living today or extinct: dragons and chameleons, chimeras and harpies, crocodiles and minotaurs, elephants and giants, whose petrified bones are still found today, to our amazement, in the heart of the mountains. And so it was for the centaurs themselves, since in this festival of origins, in this panspermia, the few survivors of the human family also participated.
(followed by more of interest)
(yes, I know he committed suicide, makes me sad. I still appreciate him.)
(if I remember, he was also a chemist, or something like that)
) , tomatoes, corn, beans, chickens that follow me in the yard, a baby possum that is on my lap, did I say new home? 
