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Sunday, 15 .July, 2007, 10:26 - English Entries, Literature
"[...] I beg your tolerance. There is nothing I can do to make things any easier for any of us, and you will have to accept being addressed by a disembodied voice just as I accept the compulsion to speak out even though I am painfully aware that I am talking to an invisible, perhaps nonexistent, audience. Wise men have regarded the earth as a tragedy, a farce, even an illusionist's trick; but all, if they are truly wise and not merely intellectual rapists, recognize that it is certainly some kind of stage in which we all play rolse, most of us being very poorly coached and totally unrehearsed before the curtain rises. Is it too much if I ask, tentatively, that we agree to look upon it for as a circus, a touring carnival wandering about the sun for a record season of four billion years and producing new monsters and miracles, hoaxes and bloody mishaps, wonders and blunders, but never quite entertaining the customers well enough to prevent them from leaving, one by one, and returning to their homes for a long and bored winter's sleep under the dust? Then, say, for a while at least, that I have found an identity as ringmaster; but that crown sits uneasily on my head (if I have a head) and I must warn you that the troupe is small for a universe this size and many of us have to double or triple our stints, so you can expect me back in many other guises. Indeed do many things come to pass."
From the first pages of: Illuminatus! - The Eye in The Pyramid, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
Yesterday I read, that Robert Anton Wilson returned to his home for a long winter's sleep under the dust. He died in January this year, but I did not get aware of it till now.
For many years I would have said, that there was never a book in my life, that influenced me like Illumniatus! did. Lots of things Wilson wrote and thought might sound strange or stupid, but there is one thing that he taught me, that there is nothing that cannot be followed by a pair of brackets which hold the sentence "do you really believe this?"
Thanks for the script, RAW - the rest of us now please back on stage.