The Music Behind The Moon

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  —De grâce, belle dame, si je puis vous demander ce que fait a coeur de savoir, dites-moi pourquoi vous êtes assise ici toute seule?

  —Je vais te le dire, man pauvre Madoc, avec franchise.

THE TEXT FROM GENESIS

  To such as will to listen I plan here to tell the story of Madoc and some little part of the story of Ettarre.

  Now this is a regrettably familiar tale. It may possibly have begun with Lamech, in the Book of Genesis,—who was, in any event, the first well-thought-of citizen upon known record to remark, “I have slain a young man to my hurt!” And poets tell us that many poets whose bodies had survived to middle age have repeated this glum observation, although probably not ever since then, when Lamech spoke without tact, to their co-partners alike in the homicide and in married life.

  Moreover, this is a regrettably inconclusive tale, without any assured ending. Nor is there any assured prophesying, either, that the next thousand years or so will remedy that defect in this tale, because the story of Ettarre is not lightly to be ended by the death of any woman’s body which for a while Ettarre has been wearing.

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