Tom Palven
11-09-2009, 06:52 AM
From the short story, Zadig, by Voltaire:
In Babylon, battling thugs to save his beloved Semira, Zadig's eye was grazed by an arrow and the wound became inflamed. Semira "sent as far as Memphis for Hermes, the celebrated physician there... Upon his first visit, he preemptorily declared that Zadig would lose his eye and foretold not only the day, but the hour that the woeful disaster would befall him. Had it been the right eye, said the great man, I could have administered an infallible specific, but the misfortune of the left eye is beyond the art of man to cure...
Zadig soon after was perfectly recovered. Hermes thereupon wrote a very long and elaborate treatise to prove that the wound ought not to have healed, which added tio his impressive credentials.
We can now expect that within a couple of years, the US Treasury Secretary and the Federal Reserve Chairman will get big advance payments for books explaining why their hugely expensive bail-outs couldda, shouldda, worked.
In Babylon, battling thugs to save his beloved Semira, Zadig's eye was grazed by an arrow and the wound became inflamed. Semira "sent as far as Memphis for Hermes, the celebrated physician there... Upon his first visit, he preemptorily declared that Zadig would lose his eye and foretold not only the day, but the hour that the woeful disaster would befall him. Had it been the right eye, said the great man, I could have administered an infallible specific, but the misfortune of the left eye is beyond the art of man to cure...
Zadig soon after was perfectly recovered. Hermes thereupon wrote a very long and elaborate treatise to prove that the wound ought not to have healed, which added tio his impressive credentials.
We can now expect that within a couple of years, the US Treasury Secretary and the Federal Reserve Chairman will get big advance payments for books explaining why their hugely expensive bail-outs couldda, shouldda, worked.