The Cream of the Jest - James Branch Cabell (life changing books to read TXT) 📗

complete oblivion. There, too, were perishing all the writings of the Pleiad⁠—the noble tragedies of Homerus, and Sositheus, and Lycophron, and Alexander, and Philiscus, and Sosiphanes, and Dionysides. All the great comic poets, too, were burned pell-mell with these⁠—Telecleides, Hermippus, Eupolis, Antiphanes, Ameipsas, Lysippus, and Menander⁠—“whom nature mimicked,” as the phrase was. And here, posting to obliteration, went likewise Thespis, and Pratinas, and Phrynichus⁠—and Choerilus, whom cultured persons had long ranked with Homer. Nothing was to remain of any of these save the bare name, and even this would be known only to pedants. All these, spurred by the poet’s ageless monomania, had toiled toward, and had attained, the poet’s ageless goal⁠—to write perfectly of beautiful happenings: and of this action’s normal byproduct, which is immortality in the mouths and minds of succeeding generations, all these were being robbed, by the circumstance that parchment is inflammable.

Here was beauty, and wit, and learning, and genius, being wasted⁠—quite wantonly⁠—never to be recaptured, never to be equaled again (despite the innumerable painstaking penmen destined to fret the hearts of unborn wives), and never, in the outcome, to be thought of as a very serious loss to anybody, after all.⁠ ⁠…

These book-rolls burned with great rapidity, crackling cheerily as the garnered wisdom of Cato’s octogenarian life dissolved in puffs of smoke, and the wit of Sosipater blazed for the last time in heating a pint of water.⁠ ⁠… But then in Parma long afterward Kennaston observed a monk erasing a song of Sappho’s from a parchment on which the monk meant to inscribe a feeble little Latin hymn of his own composition: in an obscure village near Alexandria Kennaston saw the only existent copy of the Mimes of Herondas crumpled up and used as packing for a mummy-case; and at Prior Park Kennaston watched Mrs. Elizabeth Barnes, then acting as cook for Dr. William Warburton, destroy in making pie-crust the unique manuscript copies of three of Shakespeare’s dramas, which had never been printed.

And⁠—conceding Heaven to be an actual place, and attainment of its felicities to be the object of human life⁠—Kennaston could not, after all, detect any fault in Amrou’s logic. Aesthetic considerations could, in that event, but lead to profitless time-wasting where every moment was precious.

XXV Byproducts of Rational Endeavor

Then again Kennaston stood in a stonewalled apartment, like a cell, wherein there was a furnace and much wreckage. A contemplative friar was regarding the disorder about him with disapproval, the while he sucked at two hurt fingers.

“There can be no doubt that Old Legion conspires to hinder the great work,” he considered.

“And what is the great work, father?” Kennaston asked him.

“To find the secret of eternal life, my son. What else is lacking? Man approaches to God in all things save this, Imaginis imago, created after God’s image. But as yet, by reason of his mortality, man shudders in a world that is arrayed against him. Thus, the heavens threaten with winds and lightnings, with plague-breeding meteors and the unfriendly aspect of planets; the big seas molest with waves and inundations, stealthily drowning cities overnight, and sucking down tall navies as a child gulps sugarplums; whereas how many plants and gums and seeds bear man’s destruction in their tiny hearts! what soulless beasts of the field and of the wood are everywhere enleagued in endless feud against him, with tusks and teeth, with nails and claws and venomous stings, made sharp for man’s demolishment! Thus all struggle miserably, like hunted persons under a sentence of death that may at best be avoided for a little while. And manifestly, this is not as it should be.”

“Yet I much fear it is so ordered, father.”

The old man said testily: “I repeat, for your better comfort, there can be no doubt that Satan alone conspires to hinder the great work. No; it would be abuse of superstition to conceive, as would be possible for folk of slender courage, that the finger of heaven has today unloosed this destruction, to my bodily hurt and spiritual admonition.” Kennaston could see, though, that the speaker half believed this might be exactly what had happened. “For I am about no vaunting transgression of man’s estate; I do but seek to recover his lost heritage. You will say to me, it is written that never shall any man be one day old in the sight of God?⁠—Yet it is likewise written that unto God a thousand years are but one day. For this period of time, then, may each man righteously demand that death delay to enact the midwife to his second birth. It advantages not to contend that even in the heyday of patriarchs few approached to such longevity; for Moses, relinquishing to silence all save the progeny of Seth, nowhere directly tells us that some of the seed of Cain did not outlive Methuselah. Yea, and our common parent, Adam, was created in the perfect age of man, which then fell not short of one hundred years, since at less antiquity did none of the antediluvian fathers beget issue, as did Adam in the same year breath was given him; and the years of Adam’s life were nine hundred and thirty; whereby it is a reasonable conceit of learned persons to compute him to have exceeded a thousand years in age, if not in duration of existence. Now, it is written that we shall all die as Adam died; and caution should not scruple to affirm this is an excellent dark saying, prophetic of that day when no man need outdo Adam in celerity to put by his flesh.”

Then Kennaston found the alchemist had been compounding nitrum of Memphis with sulphur, mixing in a little willow charcoal to make the whole more friable, and that the powder had exploded. The old man was now interested, less in the breakage, than in the horrible noise this accident had occasioned.

“The mixture might be used in court-pageants and miracle-plays,” he estimated, “to indicate the entrance of Satan, or the