Art

“And it was only just before my last departure from that planet of yours, when the influence of beings of a similar profession from the contemporary ‘European culture’ began to become noticeable also there in Persia, and when the beings of that profession in the community Persia began to wiseacre, that such a transmission entirely ceased.

“It must also be noticed that in spite of all this, not a few of the still surviving productions of the Babylonian times reached the beings of the contemporary civilization, chiefly the beings breeding on the continent Europe. But these productions which reached the beings of this contemporary civilization—and not originals but only half- decayed copies made by their recent ancestors who had not become entirely what are called ‘plagiarists’—they simply, without suspecting the ‘well-of-wisdom’ concealed in them and without taking corresponding practicable measures, stuffed into what are called ‘museums’ where these old copies are gradually either totally destroyed or partially mutilated by frequent copying from them, made by means of various eroding and oxidizing compositions as, for instance, ‘alabaster,’ ‘fish glue’ and so on, only so that the copyists might swagger before their friends or cheat their teachers, or achieve some other Hasnamussian aim.

“It must in fairness be remarked that now and again certain beings also of the contemporary civilization have suspected that something was concealed in the productions which chanced to reach them in the original, specially cre- ated then in Babylon by the members of the club of the Adherents-of-Legominism, or in those copies which were made during their transmission from generation to generation by various conscientious professionals, that is by such professionals to whom, as I have already said, it was still not quite proper to plagiarize, and who therefore did not resort to the detailed remaking of others’ productions in order to give them out as their own, and thereafter while searching very seriously for this something, certain of those inquiring beings of that European civilization even found in them a certain definite ‘something-or-other.’