B499 <=> B501 [BTG XXX Art, p. 500]

“For instance, when beings of the contemporary England utter their favorite and frequently used expression ‘thank you,’ you can clearly hear the ancient letter ‘theta’; and when they pronounce the word they like no less, and also frequently use – the word ‘there’ – you hear quite distinctly and definitely the ancient letter ‘delta’; but, all the same, for both these letters they use without any what is called remorse, the same ‘universally paradoxical’ ‘th.’

“However, I think I’ve talked enough about terrestrial philology.

“We had better continue to clear up first the causes why it has been customary among your contemporary favorites to have such theaters everywhere, and afterwards what their contemporary actors do in these theaters, and how they manifest themselves there.

“As regards the question why it became the custom among them to assemble, often in considerable groups, in these theaters of theirs, it was in my opinion because these contemporary theaters of theirs and all that goes on in them happen to correspond very well to the abnormally formed common presences of most of these contemporary three-brained beings, in whom there had been already finally lost the need, proper to three-brained beings, to actualize their own initiative in everything, and who exist only according to chance shocks from outside or to the promptings of the consequences crystallized in them of one or other of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer.

“From the very beginning of the arising of those theaters of theirs, they assembled and now assemble in them for the purpose of watching and studying the reproductions of their contemporary ‘actors’; no . . . they assemble only for the satisfaction of one of the consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer, a consequence which had been readily crystallized in the common presences of the majority of them, and called ‘Oornel,’ which the contemporary beings now call ‘swaggering.’