The late Kurt Schnoock of Witizburg created a maelstrom of international tension in academic circles with his philosophical pamphlets. Schnoock, a beekeeper in the days before it was fashionable, began to publish only in his 50th year. A new volume, posthumously collected, is due to hit the shelves this spring. Schnoock was regarded by many of his peers as eccentric and by some as dangerous. His booklet, Jewellery, Fleas And The Telescope, was the sensation of the Viennese conference on "Ontology and the Layman".
No stranger to scorn, he was described by Dr Vivienne Lurg as overrated, especially by the underfives. He responded to public criticism with a flurry of papers during what is now called his Golden Period, between 1907 and 1909.
Some 98,000 pamphlets went to press, many of them several million words in length. These included The Porpoise Menace; Some Observa- tions On One-eyed Mice Being Trapped In A Pair Of Tights Filled With Long Grain Rice; How To Cheat Chickens At Chess; Eggs: The History Of An Evil; Learning To Lip- Read Frogs and many others. We are privileged to preview selections from his final volume, Reliquary.
1: "Do you have any honey, I ask the bee." "Buzzz, he replies." "Who has the upper hand?"
2: "What God sees is largely hats."
3: "An owl and a moose were talking." "You look so tired, said the moose."
4: "So-and-so is the very Devil himself, you say." "No, I say. He is merely an arsehole."
5: "As moonlight bounces off your beloved she worries what it will do to her complexion."
6: "As a gardener prunes his azaleas, let it be so with you and your own azaleas, if you wish to have healthy azaleas, if not, ignore all azalea-orientated advice. For what is the point of counselling a man on his azaleas if he has none. Even the word itself is tiresome. Azaleas, azaleas, azaleas . . . " (The text breaks off here and is spattered with what appears to be eggnog.)
7: "Some things are just weird like those cheese dips you get that contain hardly any cheese but lots of phumpff resin. I mean . . . wow . . . Jesus."
8: "The beautiful woman is muchadmired . . . But take away her shining features, the ivory throat, her high-breasted torso and the hewn girdle of her hips and thighs and what are you left with? Knees, insteps . . . write a poem about that, you ponce."
9: "There she goes, justa walking down the street" . . . goes the song. "Singing doowadiddydiddy dumdiddydo." "Is this not a fiction? Shouldn't it begin `There she was justa walking down the corridor?' "
10: "If you would have a lawyer for a son, beat him about the head relentlessly until he is 21."
Diary: 12.11.96: Lottie has agreed to marry me on condition that she never has to see me or talk to me for the first 20 years. We shall meet at the local roller-disco in 2016. I have already made preparations for our honeymoon, she is in luxury at the Paris Ritz and I paying for room service from the South Pole.
11: "I'm only human, he said."
"No, not quite, I replied, but you exhibit much of what is associated with Hominoids."
12: "If a drunk man, a priest and a policeman travel together by train, only in the tunnel's darkness will they smile."
13: "Nothingness must be composed of several somethings, for if we begin with nothing we end up with merely a weekend in Cavan . . . You need a whole week to truly apprehend nothingness."
Diary: 14.11.96 Finally we have consummated our relationship by fax. I told her she was like a fiery moon, a quake of elemental power, a rose in an ice floe. She said that's what everybody says.
14: "If a man (the text is tarnished here with more eggnog . . . something, something) . . . mounds of beetroot."
15: "If it takes four mathematicians to work out one problem in a quarter of the time it takes a single mathematician . . . why don't they just go round in groups of eight or nine million?"
Diary: 16.11.96: Love is like an omelette. Only more complicated and with less emphasis on eggs.
16: "Beware the librarian who offers you wheat."
Schnoock's finger was always firmly pressed on the jugular of the Zeitgeist. But his rivals were ever keen to disparage his abilities. This is evidenced in the famous tete-atete between himself and Wittgenstein in a Cambridgeshire pub, orchestrated by Wittgenstein's acolytes.
W: "Do you have any matches?"
S: "I don't smoke."
W: "Do you have any matches?"
S: (After a two-hour pause) "I don't know. Please stop it. Stop it. Stop it."
Schnoock's reputation is still being estimated. But within the hearts of global wisdom seekers, his memory burns as bright as his insight.