from "The Old Woman's Hide," which is in Italian Folktales, Selected and Retold by Italo Calvino
I love the openings of fairy tales. Often the stories are not nearly as inspiring, but the first paragraphs . . .
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The Dead Sea is said to have a salt concentration so high that it allows the body to float easily with no effort at all.
This guy is supposedly proving that to us. But I suspect that's his girlfriend hiding behind the newspaper, holding him up.
The Dead Sea is also said to be the site of Sodom and Gomorrah. That fits.
So that's what salt is for...
My wife used to have us taking a type of multi-vitamin, one of whose virtues was said to be that the array of minerals it contained was the same as was found in ancient seawater. I have no idea what research was done to establish this. The pickling story hits home, sort of like the short but rich tale in A Diet of Murderous Thoughts. Salt is powerful; the Dead Sea seems gross. Look at the feet of the guy reading the newspaper in the photo Tom posted. Curtis
I did look. Yuck. That's probably tar not salt. But how would I know? I'm not allowed to consume either substance.
The marine oil deposits off the coast at Isla Vista, near Santa Barbara, create a sharp tar-like odour that permeates the atmosphere for some distance. Unforgettable.
That odour drifted back, like the taste of that famous madeleine of Marcel's, the minute I saw this photo.
(The great naturalist W.H. Hudson believed that of all sensory memoria, those involving smell mysteriously persist and retain their evocative powers the longest... though, happily, he wasn't referring to stinky feet, but to The Perfume of an Evening Primrose.)
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