"Keats, entirely a stranger to error, could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: "the nightingale that devours time." Schopenhauer — impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer — provides a reason: the pure corporeal immediacy in which animals live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile: Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one."
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Horror authorsChildren's authorsPoets from ScotlandNovelists from ScotlandShort story writers from Scotland
Original Language: English
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Sources
Jorge Luis Borges in "A History of Eternity" as translated in Selected Non-Fictions Vol. 1, (1999), edited by Eliot Weinberger
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Louis_Stevenson
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Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson (13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a representative of Neo-romanticism.
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