31 Vance was here using the English connotation of “trillion,” which is the third power of a million, as opposed to the American and French system of numeration which regards a trillion as a mere million millions. [↩︎]
32 Lumen was invented by the French astronomer to prove the possibility of the reversal of time. With a speed of 250,000 miles per second, he was conceived as soaring into space at the end of the battle of Waterloo, and catching up all the light-rays that had left the battlefield. He attained a gradually increasing lead, until at the end of two days he was witnessing, not the end, but the beginning of the battle; and in the meantime he had been viewing events in reverse order. He had seen projectiles leaving the objects they had penetrated and returning to the cannon; dead men coming to life and arranging themselves in battle formation. Another hypothetical adventure of Lumen was jumping to the moon, turning about instantaneously, and seeing himself leaping from the moon to the earth backwards. [↩︎]
33 Vance requested me to mention here A. d’Abro’s recent scholarly work, “The Evolution of Scientific Thought,” in which there is an excellent discussion of the paradoxes associated with space-time. [↩︎]
34 Vance’s M. A. thesis, I recall, dealt with Schopenhauer’s “Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde.” [↩︎]
35 I do not know whether Vance was here referring to “Mars and Its Canals” or “Mars as the Abode of Life.” [↩︎]
36 Pardee left in his will a large sum for the furtherance of chess; and in the autumn of that same year, it will be remembered, the Pardee Memorial Tournament was held at Cambridge Springs. [↩︎]
37 Of the Wagnerian operas this was Vance’s favorite. He always asserted that it was the only opera that had the structural form of a symphony; and more than once he expressed the regret that it had not been written as an orchestral piece instead of as a conveyance for an absurd drama. [↩︎]
38 Vance’s set was the William Archer copyright edition, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. [↩︎]
39 I admit that the name of Rhazis was unfamiliar to me; and when I looked it up later I found that the episode to which Vance referred does not appear in the Anglican Bible, but in the second book of Maccabees in the Apocrypha. [↩︎]
40 “One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. The death which takes place in the most contemptible circumstances, the death that is not free, the death which occurs at the wrong time, is the death of a coward. We have not the power to prevent ourselves from being born; but this error—for sometimes it is an error—can be rectified if we choose. The man who does away with himself, performs the most estimable of deeds; he almost deserves to live for having done so.” [↩︎]