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- 10142
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:09.931Z
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- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 10071
- text
- not? Tell us, ye sages! something worth an archangel’s learning;
discover, ye discoverers, something new. Fools, fools! Mardi’s not
changed: the sun yet rises in its old place in the East; all things go
on in the same old way; we cut our eye-teeth just as late as they did,
three thousand years ago.”
“Your pardon,” said Mohi, “for beshrew me, they are not yet all cut. At
threescore and ten, here have I a new tooth coming now.”
“Old man! it but clears the way for another. The teeth sown by the
alphabet-founder, were eye-teeth, not yet all sprung from the soil.
Like spring-wheat, blade by blade, they break ground late; like
spring-wheat, many seeds have perished in the hard winter glebe. Oh, my
lord! though we galvanize corpses into St. Vitus’ dances, we raise not
the dead from their graves! Though we have discovered the circulation
of the blood, men die as of yore; oxen graze, sheep bleat, babies bawl,
asses bray—loud and lusty as the day before the flood. Men fight and
make up; repent and go at it; feast and starve; laugh and weep; pray
and curse; cheat, chaffer, trick, truckle, cozen, defraud, fib, lie,
beg, borrow, steal, hang, drown—as in the laughing and weeping,
tricking and truckling, hanging and drowning times that have been.
Nothing changes, though much be new-fashioned: new fashions but
revivals of things previous. In the books of the past we learn naught
but of the present; in those of the present, the past. All Mardi’s
history—beginning middle, and finis—was written out in capitals in the
first page penned. The whole story is told in a title- page. An
exclamation point is entire Mardi’s autobiography.”
“Who speaks now?” said Media, “Bardianna, Azzageddi, or Babbalanja?”
“All three: is it not a pleasant concert?”
“Very fine: very fine.—Go on; and tell us something of the future.”
“I have never departed this life yet, my lord.”
“But just now you said you were risen from the dead.” “From the buried
dead within me; not from myself, my lord.”
“If you, then, know nothing of the future—did Bardianna?”
“If he did, naught did he reveal. I have ever observed, my lord, that
even in their deepest lucubrations, the profoundest, frankest,
ponderers always reserve a vast deal of precious thought for their own
private behoof. They think, perhaps, that ’tis too good, or too bad;
too wise, or too foolish, for the multitude. And this unpleasant
vibration is ever consequent upon striking a new vein of ideas in the
soul. As with buried treasures, the ground over them sounds strange and
hollow. At any rate, the profoundest ponderer seldom tells us all he
thinks; seldom reveals to us the ultimate, and the innermost; seldom
makes us open our eyes under water; seldom throws open the
totus-in-toto; and never carries us with him, to the unconsubsistent,
the ideaimmanens, the super-essential, and the One.”
Confusion! Remember the Quadammodatatives!”
“Ah!” said Braid-Beard, “that’s the crack in his calabash, which all
the Dicibles of Doxdox will not mend.”
“And from that crazy calabash he gives us to drink, old Mohi.”
“But never heed his leaky gourd nor its contents, my lord. Let these
philosophers muddle themselves as they will, we wise ones refuse to
partake.”
“And fools like me drink till they reel,” said Babbalanja. “But in
these matters one’s calabash must needs go round to keep afloat.
Fogle-orum!”
- title
- Chunk 2