B1236 <=> B1238 [BTG XLVIII From the Author, p. 1237]

This old Calvados, by the way, twenty-seven bottles of it, I was thought worthy to find, accidentally covered over with a mixture of lime, sand, and finely chopped straw, several years ago when I was digging a pit for preserving carrots for the winter in one of the cellars of my now chief dwelling place.

These bottles of this divine liquid were buried in all probability by monks who lived near by, far from worldly temptations, for the salvation of their souls.

It now seems to me for some reason or other that they buried these bottles there, not without some ulterior motive, and that, thanks to their what is called “intuitive perspicacity,” the data for which particularity of theirs, one must assume, was formed in them thanks to their pious lives, they foresaw that the buried divine liquid would fall into hands worthy of understanding the meaning of such things; and now indeed this liquid stimulates the owner of these hands praiseworthily to sustain and assist the better transmission to the next generation of the meaning of the ideas on which the co-operation of these monks was founded.

I wish during this rest of mine, which from any point of view I fully deserve, to drink this splendid liquid, which alone during recent years has given me the possibility of tolerating without suffering the beasts similar to myself around me, and to listen to new anecdotes, and sometimes, for lack of new ones, old ones – of course, if there happen to be competent raconteurs.

It is now still midday, and as I have given my word that I would not, beginning only from tomorrow, write anything further for this first series, I still have time and shall not be breaking my word, if I add with a clean conscience that a year or two ago, I had categorically decided to make only the first series of my published writings generally accessible, and as regards the second and third series, to make them not generally accessible, but to organize their distribution in order, among other things, to actualize through them one of the fundamental tasks I have set myself under essence-oath; a task which consists in this: ultimately also to prove, without fail, theoretically as well as practically, to all my contemporaries, the absurdity of all their inherent ideas concerning the suppositious existences of a certain “other world” with its famous and so beautiful “paradise” and its so repugnant a “hell”; and at the same time to prove theoretically and afterwards without fail to show practically, so that even every “complete victim” of contemporary education should understand without shuddering and know, that Hell and Paradise do indeed exist, but only not there “in that world” but here beside us on Earth.