文档介绍：THE UNKNOWN GUEST
THE UNKNOWN
GUEST
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
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THE UNKNOWN GUEST
INTRODUCTION
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My Essay on Death[1] led me to make a conscientious enquiry into the
present position of the great mystery, an enquiry which I have
endeavoured to render plete as possible. I had hoped that a single
volume would be able to contain the result of these investigations, which, I
may say at once, will teach nothing to those who have been over the same
ground and which have nothing to mend them except their sincerity,
their impartiality and a certain scrupulous accuracy. But, as I proceeded, I
saw the field widening under my feet, so much so that I have been obliged
to divide my work into two almost equal parts. The first is now published
and is a brief study of veridical apparitions and hallucinations and haunted
houses, or, if you will, the phantasms of the living and the dead; of those
manifestations which have been oddly and not very appropriately
described as "psychometric"; of the knowledge of the future:
presentiments, omens, premonitions, precognitions and the rest; and lastly
of the Elberfeld horses. In the second, which will be published later, I shall
treat of the miracles of Lourdes and other places, the phenomena of so
called materialization, of the divining-rod and of fluidic asepsis, not
unmindful withal of a diamond dust of the miraculous that hangs over the
greater marvels in that strange atmosphere into which we are about to
pass.
[1] Published in English, in an enlarged form, under the title of Our
Eternity (London and New York, 1913)--Translator's Note.
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When I speak of the present position of the mystery, I of course do not
mean the mystery of life, its end and its beginnings, nor yet the great
riddle of the universe which lies about us. In this sense, all is mystery, and,
as I have said elsewhere, is likely always to remain so; nor is it probable
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THE UNKNOWN GUEST
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