Jan-Maat’s Reviews > Voyages to the Moon and the Sun > Status Update

'What...is The country of lovers liable to inundations ?"
'It must be so. .for one of my lovers...write to me that his regret at my departure had caused him to shed an ocean of tears .'

The water of this river (memory) seems viscous & flows noisily; the echoes formed in its caverns repeat its speech more than a thousand times; it engenders certain monsters, whose faces are like the face of a woman. Others yet more furious are seen with square horny hear a very similar to those of our parents. There do nothing but exclaim, &yet say nothing but what they have heard other people say.

...They exclaimed that it was horrible to believe a beast whose face was not made like theirs could possess reason.
' What!' They murmured to each other; ' He has neither beak, claws, nor feathers, &yet his soul is spiritual? God's! What impertinent!'

End of the voyage to the sun.

Perhaps it was a bit more literary that the voyage to the Moon.

And of the voyage to the Moon; so many resonances, Pascal, Swift "Gulliver's Travels", Dostoevsky's 'dream of a ridiculous man', ancients vs moderns
Full of invention - mobile and sedentary homes, clockwork audio books that you can wear on your ears, topsy-turvy land perhaps Alice in Wonderland is also in debt to this?

I asked him what he could reply to the authority of Moses & that this great patriarch expressly declared that God created the world in six days. Instead of answering me, the ignorant fellow only laughed.

I think he would have gone on talking but they brought out our good, & since we were hungry I shut my ears & he his mouth to open out stomachs.

A Jesuit explsins thatthe world turns because he'll is at the centre of the earth & the soul's of the damned fly up to escape the heat and this turns the planet like a dog in a wheel.

- this makes me think of Descartes basing his philosophy on absolute faith, while here the comedian searches for reason

I found myself surrounded by a large number of savages. They appeared mightily surprised at meeting me; for I was the first, I think, that they had ever seen dressed in bottles.

Our wit must have been sharpened on the cobbles of the road for it thrust home whichever way we turned it