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- 5431
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:09.927Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 5400
- text
- Alla-Malolla goes further. Says he, ‘Let us club together,
fellow-riddles:—Kings, clowns, and intermediates. We are bundles of
comical sensations; we bejuggle ourselves into strange phantasies: we
are air, wind, breath, bubbles; our being is told in a tick.’”
“Now, then, Babbalanja,” said Media, “what have you come to in all this
rhapsody? You everlastingly travel in a circle.”
“And so does the sun in heaven, my lord; like me, it goes round, and
gives light as it goes. Old Bardianna, too, revolved. He says so
himself. In his roundabout chapter on Cycles and Epicycles, with Notes
on the Ecliptic, he thus discourseth:—‘All things revolve upon some
center, to them, fixed; for the centripetal is ever too much for the
centrifugal. Wherefore, it is a perpetual cycling with us, without
progression; and we fly round, whether we will or no. To stop, were to
sink into space. So, over and over we go, and round and round;
double-shuffle, on our axis, and round the sun.’ In an another place,
he says:—‘There is neither apogee nor perigee, north nor south, right
nor left; what to-night is our zenith, to-morrow is our nadir; stand as
we will, we stand on our heads; essay to spring into the air, and down
we come; here we stick; our very bones make glue.’”
“Enough, enough, Babbalanja,” cried Media. “You are a very wise
Mardian; but the wisest Mardians make the most consummate fools.”
“So they do, my lord; but I was interrupted. I was about to say, that
there is no place but the universe; no limit but the limitless; no
bottom but the bottomless.”
- title
- Chunk 5