Once there was a fellow, and a very cruel fellow he must have been, who went out into his town and brought five blind men back to his parlor. He handed one an umbrella stand, another a fur coat, the third a souvenir ashtray, the fourth a deadly poisonous snake, and the last a sack of fertilizer. He then tried to persuade the blind men that they were all touching parts of a common entity, which he called an “elephant”, and that their fragmentary and disparate perceptions were deceptive; that there was unity in all this contradictory variety. Then, as everyone knows, the serpent bit the fourth gentleman, who went into painful agonies, convulsed and died; whereupon the remaining blind men banded together and beat their tormentor with the umbrella stand until he was dead.
But my purpose is not to start off your holiday season with a merry and amusing fable; I tell you, indirectly, that there is no Unity to be found in these pages. I can predict that even before the first of them is written! There will be no over-arching themes, no recurrent motifs, no significant hints; in short, this is a collection of oddments, not an elephant. So feel free, my blind friends, to follow me around the parlor and grasp the bits of rummage and trash I hand you over the coming weeks, but don’t drink anything, and don’t believe a word I say.
Rosebud.
