So they said to one another:
"'Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever to
mock the credulity of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write
about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust
journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all
the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the
keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities
worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of
them, and yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter
the world over--and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities
and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion,
so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there'll be no
more nonsense in the world.
"'Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of
style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound
scepticism and our universal irony.'
"So the men did, and they died.
"But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so
astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and
genius had endowed it.
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