duration which cannot find room at the same time in our
intelligence and which inevitably devour one other. 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, Cavalliere
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
motorcar, 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 lighted; 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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