Word: thoughts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Pratt Segmiller isn't running a filling station in Marysvale (pop. 600), Utah, he hunts rocks. One day, while prospecting around the sage and cedar-covered mountains northeast of Marysvale, he found some strange yellow-colored rocks strewn over a surface of about 60 acres. Segmiller thought they might be valuable, so he staked a claim and called the Vanadium Corp. of America. When it inspected the claim; it got pretty excited and leased the land from Segmiller. The yellow rocks were autunite, a uranium-bearing ore, and the strike looked like the most promising yet made...
...Hollywood, the drinking of bottled water has become a mark of class; only such lowlifes as $1,000-a-week writers drink tap water. Theodora thought that she would have something special with her water from Hereford, where tooth decay is almost unknown, supposedly because of fluorine in the water (TIME, Nov. 10, 1941). She sewed up commercial rights with the town of Hereford ("For all the water we'll ever need"), and leased a 10,000-gallon railway tank car to haul the water to Hollywood at $1,100 a trip...
Poor Adriana did not have her mother's business sense. She liked her work so much that the money was secondary, sometimes gave herself to her customers "out of physical exuberance." At times, she thought about a cute cottage, husband and kids (she had first been seduced by a chauffeur who promised her all that). But she thought just as often about "how I enjoyed love-making and money and the things money can provide...
...police official who loved her, a neurotic student whom she loved sincerely, and a murderer who got her pregnant. In a final blaze of violence all of them were wiped out of her life, but Adriana met terror, as she met all adversity, with a forthright philosophy: "I thought how [my baby] would be the child of a murderer and a prostitute; but any man in the world might happen to kill someone and any woman might sell herself for money; and what mattered most of all was that he should have an easy birth and grow up strong...
Novelist Moravia (who anomalously gives his unschooled protagonist his own clarity of thought and narration) has peppered The Woman of Rome with flashes of wisdom that seem like borrowed pearls as simple Adriana threads them: "We never get clear, definite changes in life; and those who do make hurried changes risk seeing their old habits come to the fore once again, still alive and as deep-rooted as ever." Those who want to read universal meanings into this couch-worn tale will have to do it at the level of amorality where only the Adrianas of the world can move...