Belgian essays (French) -- Translations into English; Death
of duration which cannot find room at the same time in our intelligence
and which inevitably devour one another. How can we picture to ourselves,
for instance, a point in eternity at which our little procession already
exists, while it is not yet and although it is no more? Add to this the
thought that it is necessary and inevitable, from the millenaries which
had no beginning, that, at a given moment, at a given place, the little
procession should leave the little church in a given manner and that no
known or imaginable will can change anything in it, in the future any
more than in the past; and we begin to understand that there is no hope
of understanding.
29
We find among the cases collected by M. Bozzano a singular premonition
wherein the unknown factors of space and time are continued in a very
curious fashion. In August 1910, Cavaliere Giovanni de Figueroa, one of
the most famous fencing-masters at Palermo, dreamt that he was in the
country, going along a road white with dust, which brought him to a broad
ploughed field. In the middle of the field stood a rustic building, with
a ground-floor used for store-rooms and cow-sheds and on the right a
rough hut made of branches and a cart with some harness lying in it.
A peasant wearing dark trousers, with a black felt hat on his head, came
forward to meet him, asked him to follow him and took him round behind
the house. Through a low, narrow door they entered a little stable with a
short, winding stone staircase leading to a loft over the entrance to the
house. A mule fastened to a swinging manger was blocking the bottom step;
and the chevalier had to push it aside before climbing the staircase.
On reaching the loft, he noticed that from the ceiling were suspended
strings of melons, tomatoes, onions and Indian corn. In this room were
two women and a little girl; and through a door leading to another room
he caught sight of an extremely high bed, unlike any that he had ever
seen before.
Here the dream broke off. It seemed to him so strange that he spoke of it
to several of his friends, whom he mentions by name and who are ready to
confirm his statements.
On the 12th of October in the same year, in order to support a
fellow-townsman in a duel, he accompanied the seconds, by motor-car, from
Naples to Marano, a place which he had never visited nor even heard of.
As soon as they were some way in the country, he was curiously impressed
by the white and dusty road. The car pulled up at the side of a field
which he at once recognized. They alighted; and he remarked to one of the
seconds:
“This is not the first time that I have been here. There should be a
house at the end of this path and on the right a hut and a cart with some
harness in it.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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