Thomas Godfrey (Ed) Read Online Free PDF Page A

God. Y’see, sugar, he
believed, or wanted to, but you, with your pretty little scientific mind, had
to have absolute certainty.”
    “No, Kaiser, I swear.”
    “So you pretend to study philosophy
because that gives you a chance to eliminate certain obstacles. You get rid of
Socrates easy enough, but Descartes takes over, so you use Spinoza to get rid
of Descartes, but when Kant doesn’t come through you have to get rid of him too.”
    “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
    “You made mincemeat out of Leibnitz,
but that wasn’t good enough for you because you knew if anybody believed Pascal
you were dead, so he had to be gotten rid of too, but that’s where you make
your mistake because you trusted Martin Buber. Except, sugar, he was soft. He
believed in God, so you had to get rid of God yourself.”
    “Kaiser, you’re mad!”
    “No, baby. You posed as a pantheist
and that gave you access to Him— if He existed, which
he did. He went with you to Shelby’s party and when Jason wasn’t looking, you
killed Him.”
    “Who the hell are Shelby and Jason?”
    “What’s the difference? Life’s
absurd now anyway.”
    “Kaiser,” she said, suddenly
trembling. “You wouldn’t turn me in?”
    “Oh yes, baby. When the Supreme
Being gets knocked off, somebody’s got to take the rap.”
    “Oh, Kaiser, we could go away
together. Just the two of us. We could forget about philosophy. Settle down and
maybe get into semantics.”
    “Sorry, sugar. It’s no dice.”
    She was all tears now as she started
lowering the shoulder straps of her peignoir and I was standing there suddenly
with a naked Venus whose whole body seemed to be saying, Take me—I’m yours. A
Venus whose right hand tousled my hair while her left hand had picked up a
forty-five and was holding it behind my back. I let go with a slug from my
thirty-eight before she could pull the trigger, and she dropped her gun and
doubled over in disbelief.
    “How could you, Kaiser?”
    She was fading fast, but I managed
to get it in, in time.
    “The manifestation of the universe
as a complex idea unto itself as opposed to being in or outside the true Being
of itself is inherently a conceptual nothingness or Nothingness in relation to
any abstract form of existing or to exist or having existed in perpetuity and
not subject to laws of physicality or motion or ideas relating to nonmatter or
the lack of objective Being or subjective otherness.”
    It was a subtle concept but I think
she understood before she died.
     
    What! Not a Christmas story, you
say? I refer you to the winner of the fifth race at Aqueduct.

     
    “Then
Mrs. Cratchit entered, smiling proudly, with the pudding. Oh. a wonderful
pudding! Shaped like a cannonball, blazing in half-a-quartern of ignited brandy
bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top, and stuffed full with plums
and sweetmeats and sodium diacetate and monoglyceride and potassium bromate and
aluminum phosphate and calcium phosphate monobasic and chloromine T and
aluminum potassium sulfate and calcium propionate and sodium alginate and
butylated hydroxyanisole and...”
     
     

    Robin Hood’s Epitaph
    Hear undernead dis laith
stean
    Laiz Robert Earl of Huntington
    Nea arcir uer az hie sa
geude:
    An piple kaud im Robin
Heud.
    Sic utlawz as hi an iz men,
    Wil England never sigh
agen.
    Obiit 24 kal. Decembris,
1247.
    From a gravestone in
    Kirklees Churchyard,Yorkshire.
     

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle - Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle
    It
is by now catechismic that Conan Doyle wrote the first of his Sherlock Holmes
stories while waiting for his medical practice to grow. He must have enjoyed
those early works as a welcome relief from the world of intractable physical
ailments. What better escape for him after a day of gas pains and ‘the vapors’
than to open his sketchbook and let his mind wander through the corridors of
Baskerville Hall or the moors outside Dartmoor Prison. It provided some needed
diversion; it also helped to