Читать книгу Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells онлайн

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Imagine, if you can, the indignation of kindly Sir Walter were the news ever to reach him in Valhalla that urchins now at school are not only forced to study his light-hearted romances as holiday tasks, but are actually examined upon them!

So, comparing small things with great, let me say: “Absit omen.”

My faith in the spoken charm of that phrase is, however, none too robust. Heaven helps the man who helps himself. And so, by way of reinforcing the Powers in their efforts to divert professorial attention from this essay of mine, I am leaving it, by a careful act of carelessness, incomplete.

Here, then, you have the real reason for my exclusion of the organ of Jacobson (and the like). It is merely a dodge to prevent the book ever becoming a task in any way, for any one, at any time.

He who runs may read herein, then, without slackening pace—or he may refrain from reading, just as he pleases, seeing that he can never be under the compulsion of remembering a single word I have written.

This, if I may say so, is, in my opinion, the only kind of book worth reading. At all events, it is the only kind I ever enjoy reading, and I say if a book is not enjoyable it is already placed upon the only Index Expurgatorius that is worth a... an anathema.