Prehistoric Times Read Online Free PDF

forces the author of this text to go back and do a double take – what did I write? – and even if it forces the bilingual reader to also take another little trip to the original, thereby slowing down the narrative even more – but I was told, nay, assured, that there was no malevolence where none intended, and that the narrator would gladly give me an entire page to express the nuance of his pun in slow and ingenious periphrases that, indeed, delay his taking on his functions even more: so he will wait patiently until I have overcome the difficulty, what else can he do, there’s no bad faith here this time, it’s simply a case of absolute necessity, which, by definition, cannot be imputed to me, whatever the original narrator and his smooth professor think. I have my conscience, I didn’t invent the Babel of this world, and when given the choice between two languages, I always choose English, and when given the choice between two words as well, I always choose the one that serves my thought or idea best, not the author’s – and a grate is heavy to open, it needs an equally heavy skeleton key, dotted with rust, a key you can wear on your belt, unlike the gate, what I understand by gate, a little squeaky tinny place of ingress that needs merely a tiny latchkey to open it, a tiny key that clinks like small change deep in your pocket. Likewise, I’m told, some ornithologists will know the difference between a downy woodpecker and a hairy woodpecker (Downy has a white back and a small bill, like a latchkey, whereas Hairy has a white back and a large bill, like a skeleton key, and any common bird-watcher should be able to distinguish between Downy’s flat pick , which is not nearly as sharp as Hairy’s peek – aha, a pick can be used to pick a lock, a peek can be used to peek through the keyhole – the words came straight from Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds East of the Rockies – they have nothing to do with me. [trans.]

 
    W OULD I even confess that I am now eager to get down to work? Why not? But would I manage to extract this confession from myself? What would such a forced confession be worth anyway? Or perhaps I could confess only later to retract my confession, thereby slowing the terrible machine set in motion, jamming its gears? But, once inside, would I still have the strength and clarity of mind to act according to my plans? Am I not instead running the risk of being ground to a powder by attempting to impede the natural evolution of events, then carried off by my own tale as it suddenly obeys the laws of its genre and sprints impetuously and inexorably toward its end, and toward my own as a result, when all the pages have been turned. Is there, in truth, any difference between the page you turn once it has been read and the one you forcefully rip out, twist up, and place on the dying embers to rekindle the blaze? The reader’s left hand holds nothing but ashes; it is not in my interest to race toward the conclusion of this tale and consequently even less in my interest to hurl myself into it headlong and blindly, I’ll go in soon enough.
    For I shall get there, I’m already getting there, by the winding routes that are my own, even if at times my pencil point breaks or, more often, slips, dragging the sentence along, which is then diverted and turns into a digression assharply and unpredictably as a shying horse that is obviously too spirited to have descended from the Forest horse of old with its goatlike beard, bushy mane and tail, dense and wiry coat, sloping croup and crude joints, today represented by those draft or packhorses that taste like beef but most probably belong to the noble lineage of the Steppe horse with its concave profile, stiff coat, strong and slender joints, I’d lean toward one of those swift pintos favored by the Comanche, either an overo, whose coat will be black or brown with big, light-colored patches, or else, no, a white-speckled tobiano, a stallion or a mare,