Extraordinary Tales

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1987), Argentinian Nobel laureate, and Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999) took great delight in making a collection of writings gathered from a bewildering variety of sources, called Extraordinary Tales (1967).  Here we see that dark sepia mystery again - the strange thoughts, feelings and encounters that humans hide in their ribs, writings that stick in the memory, imponderables.  

EUGENICS
A lady of quality fell so deliriously in love with a certain Mr Dodd, a Puritan preacher, that she begged her husband to allow her to use the marital bed for purposes of procreating an angel or a saint;  but, permission having been granted, the birth was normal.
                                  -  Drummond, Ben Ionsiana (c. 1618) 

NOSCE TE IPSUM
The Mahdi and his hordes were laying siege to Khartum, defended by General Gordon.  A few of the enemy passed through the lines and entered the city.  Gordon received them one by one and indicated a mirror where they might see themselves.  He thought it was only right that a man should know his own face before he died.
                                  -  Fergus Nicholson, Antologia de espejos

THE DREAM OF CHUANG TZU
Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly and, when he awoke, did not know if he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who was dreaming he was a man.
                        -  From Chuang Tzu (1889), by Herbert Allen Giles

                                      

Source

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