“There was once a young married couple. And it seems that on the first night—”
“Yet that story, in a great number of versions, is equally familiar to me. And really, ma’am, I question if these intolerably hackneyed tales sum up all human wisdom.”
“But the young married couple in the outcome got pleasure for their bodies in the service of those two powers which I was just talking about. The Irishmen found an unlooked-for drollness in the mechanics of those two powers, which they preserved in a neat and nicely memorable phrase, getting pleasure for their minds. So, by the way, did the two Jews and the two Scotchmen. And the traveling man, upon the next morning, after those same two powers had obtained their will of him, went away from that inn, traveling nobody knows whither; and so got, through a darker night, unbroken and uncompanioned sleep, unbothered any longer by those powers. Thus these three stories really do sum up all the gains which it is possible for a man to acquire through human living and all the wisdom that it is salutary for any man to know about.”
“Well, that is as it may be! I am persuaded that in the goal of all the gods there is a more august power than any which men know of hereabouts assuredly. For I note the sympathy and compassion and love and self-denial which human beings display toward one another, after all, rather copiously. I reflect that every art is a form of self-expression. And I deduce that the artist who created human beings was prompted in his embodiment of all these qualities by sheer egotism. He observed these qualities in his own nature: he approved of them: and so he embodied them. No actually reflective person, therefore, will ever imagine that human life does not go forward toward some kindly winding-up, since none who finds philanthropy in his own heart can doubt that philanthropy exists in the heart of his creator.”
“And does that stuff which you are now talking really seem to you,” the Sphinx asked, “sensible?”
“My dear lady, it seems to me something far better: it seems to me a rather beautiful idea. So I play with it sometimes. Now I dismiss that idea, out of deference to your proverbial wisdom: and I ask what far more gratifying and uplifting wisdom, ma’am, you may be writing in your black-covered book?”
“Oh, yes, my book!” said the Sphinx, with the livelier interest natural to an author. “You find me just now in some difficulty with my book. You conceive there has to be an opening paragraph. It would not be possible to leave out the first paragraph—”
“I can see that. I can recall no book in which there was not a first paragraph.”
“—And this paragraph ought to sum up all things, so to speak—”
“That likewise is a familiar rhetorical principle—”