قراءة كتاب The Book of Gud
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
Dan Spain.
However, upon going over the manuscript a second time, I found my instincts as an editor overwhelming this excellent resolution. For several months I was torn between my conscience as a writer with its full sense of duty to a dead author and my editorial conscience with its fuller sense of duty to the reading public—and I did nothing with the manuscript.
But at last a great compromising thought occurred to me. I could leave the manuscript stand intact, but I could write a preface in which I could explain the dreadful dilemma in which the death of my collaborator left me, and why I do not feel, under the distressing circumstances, that I should be held responsible for those parts of Spain's draft which do not meet my approval. My decision has made possible the publication of "The Book of Gud"; for otherwise I should have burned my copy also.
It is my hope that this explanation will mitigate the wrath of many readers, for it is a beautiful fact about human nature that it rarely holds the dead as responsible as it does the living.
I frankly confess that it has been a task to hold to this resolution, for I have been sorely tempted to delete as well as comment on some of Spain's text. As proof of my integrity in this matter, I have even left in the text of the book a note addressed to me by Spain in which he has expressed his contempt for my work in a most ungentlemanly manner.
I hold that the canons of literary ethics do not permit one to alter a dead man's manuscript. If they did, how quickly we could enrich the literary heritage of American children by expurgating the classics of Europe and rewriting them in a style acceptable to the American sense of decency.
To some very literally minded persons it may seem that the view just expressed is not consistent with my capacity as a joint author of "The Book of Gud." Let me therefore discount any such criticisms by explaining that the evil effects of literature all come from its realism. "The Book of Gud" is romantic and symbolic. There is true beauty in symbolism because of the variety of possible interpretations. Each reader can gain the meaning particularly adapted to himself.
The greatest art is that which can be interpreted in the most devious ways: Witness the character of Hamlet, the enigma of Mona Lisa, the riddle of the Book of Revelations. To me Hamlet is the personification of a weak will in a strong mind, due to the European habit of inbreeding royalty. Mona Lisa, I believe, reveals the patience of a great woman who knows that she will ultimately get what she wants. The Book of Revelation I deem to be a symbolic anticipation of the Darwinian theory of man's descent from prehistoric animals.
In "The Book of Gud" there is great symbolism, and in symbolism there can be nothing degrading, as each mind interprets it according to its own intellectual and moral plane. Hence there can never be degradation in symbolic literature, except for degraded minds.
Here then is "The Book of Gud"; and, with the exception of this preface, I bow to the principle that death should end an author's work and so it should remain, even as Sodom and Gomorrah, Pompeii and Herculaneum remained as they were when fire rained down on them from Heaven.
April First, 1925.
Chapter II
The "is" or "isn'tness" of things remain
As ever still unsolved. Admitting this,
Outscepting every sceptic, we've indulged
Our wildest fancies ... where unknowables
Go chasing unattainables. We've spared
No god, religion, science, sex or art,
But laid about us with a heavy fist.
There are so many twists of humor
In Euclid's cubes and angles. Laughter hides
With playfulness behind philosophy
Like little monsters in an ancient's beard.
So many gods are out of work—they beg
For bread and sympathy to empty stalls
Where once delighted thousands paid them praise.
Religion simmers in the pot, or boils
Completely over as the housewives nod.
Strange trolls peek out from books of mathematics,
Grimace around cold scientific theories.
Dwarfs and goblins play at hide and seek
In empty attics of the homes of creeds;
While sex is swept with laughter like a gale
When we disturb the surface with an axe.
Have mercy on our hero, Gud the Great.
The clouds of history had cloaked his tomb
Like old Zumbissus, Mord and Red Torswaine,
Until we carefully unearthed the tale
Gud's wild adventures furnish to romance.
We took his crumbling bones and gave them life—
His human frailties and deeds of valor.
No doubt heroically he suffers thus
At our faint hands—but let the subject be.
The future cannot hide its heroes yet
To come beneath a cloud of silence ... hands
Other than ours—aliens and scornful, too,
Would some day come upon this untold tale
And lay it bare with scalpels cold and sharp.
At least we had regard for laws of prophesy,
The customs of a future time. Here stands
The Book of Gud upon the rocks of truth.
Yet when one goes to Rome, Dame Rumor says,
Burn Roman candles—this have we done.
Chapter III
There was once a god whose name was Gud.
Gud was not a real god such as men believe in. He was only Gud, whom no one believes in, and so does not exist, and will not unless some man who reads this Book of Gud should believe in him and so make him (for that is how gods are made). If there be sufficient faith in a god, all is well with that god, since he is made by faith alone, without works, and is dead. But a little faith is a dangerous thing.
Now Gud had had a universe, and had ordered it destroyed, and had ordained that eternity be over and done.
The morning after, Gud sat alone in space. All things else had been destroyed save Gud and space; and Gud was lonely, for creation had been done and undone and was no more, and eternity was over; and time was no more, for there were no more stars to mark the course of time.
Since this book is being written now, printed now, and read now and burned now; and since printing presses and reading eyes and consuming fires exist in an age of whirling worlds and beating hearts and ticking watches, which mark time and thus seem to make it, it is that this book is not. Those things that seem to happen herein, one after another, really happened instantaneously,—for this is a tale of a timeless time, and there will be, when these things