FACTOID #151: The five countries with the highest coffee consumption are also the five countries whose citizens trust one another the most. Coincidence? Probably.
A Voice From the Attic is a collection of Robertson Davies' essays about reading aimed at intelligent and thoughtful readers, whom he calls the clerisy. Initially published in 1960, it was republished during the early 1990s. In the foreword to the 1990s edition, Davies writes that while the essays are thirty_five to forty years old, they remain strongly relevant. The essays run from musings on whether or not speed of reading and quality of reading are necessarily coincident, or even congruent, to essays on the nature of the popular book, to essays on the difference between the clerisy and the critic.
Jane's insistence that she should be the first to go was quietly overruled by my proclamations that if there actually were some crazy person living in the attic, the person with a weapon of defense ought to be the first to check it out.
It was quite unmistakably, and most distinctly, the voice of an old woman--perhaps in her eighties, perhaps older--and although I could not make out the words, she was singing something.
The singing voice stopped abruptly, as though perhaps startled by itself, and was replaced by a dry, hoarse giggle--a hideous, insane laughter--that erupted into a cackle just as an invisible finger reached out, brushed against the microphone, and pressed STOP.
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