Stanza 1: The Reader Forewarned
God grant
that the reader, emboldened and having become at present as fierce as
what he is reading, find, without loss of bearings, his way, his wild
and treacherous passage through the desolate swamps of these sombre,
poison-soaked pages; for, unless he should bring to his reading a
rigorous logic and a sustained mental effort at least as strong as his
distrust, the lethal fumes of this book shall dissolve his soul as
water does sugar. It is not right that everyone read the pages that
follow: a sole few will savour this bitter fruit without danger. As a
result, wavering soul, before penetrating further into such uncharted
barrens, draw back, step no deeper. Mark my words: draw back, step no
deeper, like the eyes of a son respectfully flinching away from his
mother's august contemplation, or rather, like an acute angle formation
of cold-sensitive cranes stretching beyond the eye can reach, soaring
through the winter silence in deep meditation, under tight sail towards
a focal point on the horizon, from where there suddenly rises a
peculiar gust of wind, omen of a storm. The oldest crane, alone at the
forefront, on seeing this, shakes his head like a rational person and
consequently his beak too, which he clicks, as he is uneasy (and so
would I be, in his shoes); whilst his old, feather-stripped neck,
contemporary of three generations of cranes, sways in irritated
undulations that foreshadow the oncoming thunderstorm. After looking
with composure several times in every direction with eyes that bespeak
experience, the first crane (for he is the privileged one to show his
tail feathers to the other, intellectually inferior cranes) vigilantly
cries out like a melancholy sentinel driving back the common enemy, and
then carefully steers the nose of the geometric figure (it would be a
triangle, but the third side, formed in space by these curious avian
wayfarers, is invisible), be it to port, or to starboard, like a
skilful captain; and, manoeuvring with wings that seem no larger than
those of a sparrow, he thus adopts, since he is no dumb creature, a
different and safer philosophical course.
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