Читать книгу Yesterday Never Dies - Brian Stableford - Страница 5

OPENING QUOTATION

“All which I bid you remember (for I will have no such Reader as I can teach) is, that the Pythagorean doctrine doth not only carry one soul from man to man, nor man to beast, but indifferently to plants also, and therefore you must not grudge to find the same soul in an Emperor, in a Post-horse, and in a mushroom.... And therefore though this soul could not move when it was a Melon, yet it may remember, and now tell me, at what lascivious banquet it was serv’d. And though it could not speak, when it was a spider, yet it can remember, and now tell me, who used it for poison to attain dignity. However the bodies have dull’d her other faculties, her memory hath ever been her own, which makes me so seriously deliver you by her relation all her passages from her first making when she was that apple which Eve eat, to this time when she is he, whose life you shall find in the end of this book.

—John Donne, “Epistle” to Metempsychosis

(dated 16 August 1601 by the author)

“The parasitism of the infinitely small is the cause of nine-tenths of our diseases. It is against this cause, more especially, that our new method of treatment is directed, and, we are happy to add, with the most perfect success.”

—François-Vincent Raspail,

Histoire naturelle de la santé et de la maladie (1845)

Oberon the Fay. A humpty dwarf only three feet high, but of angelic face, lord and king of Mommur. He told Sir Huon his pedigree, which certainly is very romantic. The lady of the Hidden Isle (Cephalonia) married Neptanebus, King of Egypt, by whom she had a son called Alexander the Great. Seven hundred years later, Julius Caesar, on his way to Thessaly, stopped in Cephalonia, and the same lady, falling in love with him, had in time another son, and that son was Oberon. At his birth the fairies bestowed their gifts—one was insight into men’s thoughts, and another was the power of transporting himself to any place instantaneously. He became a friend to Huon, whom he made his successor in the kingdom of Mommur. In the fullness of time, falling asleep in death, legions of angels carried his soul to Paradise. (Huon de Bordeaux, a romance.)

—E. Cobham Brewer,

The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

(Revised and Updated Edition, 1890)