Waves of talk from which surface the vocabularies of the most specialized and most exclusive diciplines and schools are poured over this eldery editor, whom at first glance you defined as ''a little man, shrunken and bent,'' not because he is more of a little man, more shrunken, more bent than so many others, or because the words ''little man, shrunken and bent'' are part of his way of expressing himself, but because he seems to have come from a world where they still - no: he seems to have emerged from a book where you still encounter - you've got it: he seems to have come from a world in which they still read books where you encounter ''little men, shrunken and bent.''
From Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler
