In his grand tour to seek solace for what he deemed his preternatural itch, Panurge visited the spas of the world . Under the patronage of Pantagruel, his entourage comprised Xenomanes the navigator, Canute the archbishop of Cannes, Broomhilda the matriarch of Brest, Walloon of Bedford Stryversant the countdown of Monty Cristo, Jasper John the planter of seedy evacuations, and the farmer who shall remain nameless whose brother had just died. Not to mention the concubines and dancing girls.
He was working on a draft of a history of wind when he got caught in a tornado.
While he was whirling in the twister, he ruminated revising his Language of Cows. A summary of arithmetic came into his head, with an appendix on problems of the bowel.
Any man would be tickled pink to have a double birdsbath of hands in the bush when he was two bits shy of a full deck in the dark of the moon.
The second to the last time we went to Bar Harbor we got knocked from stem to stern upside the head as my father drove through the white caps.
Bar Harbor was in the same strip mall as the WOW liquor store, Big Wash coin laundry, and the Vatican Grocery and Halal Meat Mart. Near the corner where OJ got nabbed. Same hemisphere.
Here, then, Panurge had made such progress in purity of heart in the stillness and silence of the desert that he did not even permit himself to look at a woman’s clothing, much less on a woman’s face. For when a woman from nearby chanced to meet him on his way to the cell of a certain elder, along with Archebius who was from the same desert, he, distressed at encountering her, ran back to his own monastery in greater haste than a person would use to flee from a lion or an immense dragon, forgoing the duty of the pious visit that he had set out upon. The situation was such that he was not even prevailed upon by the shouts and pleas of the aforesaid Abba Archebius, who was calling him back so that they might stay on the road that they had started out on in order to ask the elder what they had planned.
Although this was done with zeal for chastity and ardor for purity, nonetheless because it was not done according to knowledge and because the observance of discipline and the measure of appropriate strictness were excessive (for he believed that not merely familiarity with women, which really is harmful, but even the very form of that sex was to be abominated) he immediately suffered such a seizure that his whole body was paralyzed and none of its members could perform any of their functions. For not only his feet and hands but even the mechanism of his tongue, by which speech is formed, were affected, and his very ears lost their sense of hearing. The result was that nothing remained of his humanity apart from an immobile and senseless shape.
To such a state was he reduced that men’s care was in no way sufficient to minister to his sickness, and only womanly attention was of use to him. For when he was brought to a cenobium of holy virgins, food and drink, which he was unable even to beckon for, was produced for him with feminine graciousness, all his needs of nature were satisfied, and this same care was at his disposal for nearly four years—that is, until the end of his life.
I am a disembodied man, head and shoulders above the nest.
There’s tarnish on the trunk and a lifetime of wear on the rest.
This new Christian diet is all the rage, the Diet of Worms. The infidels tend to choke on it, as was its design. The doctors of divinity prescribe a bracing tonic of extreme devotion to those in remission. Many long-standing disputes have finally been settled, to the best of our knowledge.
Pantagruel was dubious of the press release, but Panurge cried to open a can.
I’m not used to thinking on my feet. Okay I’ll have extra cheese.
You would have to say that he gained his living by going backwards. He was not a cordelier in the crusades against the infidels. He had, in his own eyes, more common sense than most. When his work finally caught up with him, he was hanged by the neck until dead.
