Of Course I'm Always Double-Dipping

Was lamenting the few texts I have in paper that I still haven't gotten to (largely because I've gone 99% e-read). Dipped into Musil in The German Library last  night and this morning: Three Women. Finished "Grigia" and have started "The Lady from Portugal."

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From "Grigia":

Since, however, the cow Grigia had a distinct taste for straying valley-wards, the whole of this operation would be repeated with the regularity of pendulum-clockwork that is constantly dropping lower and constantly being wound higher again. Because this was so paradisically senseless, he teased her by calling her Grigia herself. He could not conceal from himself that his heart beat faster when from a distance he caught sight of her sitting there; that is the way the heart beats when one suddenly walks into the smell of pine-needles or into spicy air rising from the floor of woods where a great many mushrooms grow. In this feeling there was always a residual dread of Nature. And on must not believe that Nature is anything but highly unnatural: she is earthy, edgy, poisonous, and inhuman at all points where man does not impose his will upon her. Probably it was just this that fascinated him in this peasant woman, and the other half of it was inexhaustible amazement that she did so much resemble a woman. One would, after all, be equally amazed, going through the woods, to encounter a lady balancing a tea-cup.

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