book reading corner: persian letters

I finished reading Montesquieu's Persian Letters. It was a bit of a trudge. My edition had a slew of errors and missing footnotes which didn't help my trudgery. Grr.  

A selection of the letters I liked:

- number 108, on reviewing and reading: "the great mistake made by reviewers is that they write only about new books, as if the truth could ever be new.  It seems to me that until a man has read all the old books, he has no reason to prefer new ones instead"

- number 143, Rica to Nathaniel Levi, a Jewish doctor.  This is the letter on literary remedies, the power of the mind on sickness.

- and the Fragment from an Ancient Mythologist, which was found in a series of items not originally published by Montesquieu.  I'll post it here:

In an island near the Orcades a child was born, whose father was Aeolus, god of the winds, and whose mother was a Caledonian nymph.  He is said to have learnt all by himself to count on his fingers, and, at four years of age, to have been able to distinguish between the different metals so exactly that when his mother tried to give him a ring made of brass, instead of gold, he realized that it was a trick and threw the ring on the ground.

     As soon as he was fully grown his father taught him the secret of catching the wind in balloons, which he then sold to travellers.  How-ever, since his wares were not greatly appreciated in his own country, he left, and began to lead a wandering life in the company of the blind (bling?) god of chance.

     In his travels he learnt that in Betica everything shone with gold, which made him hurry to get there. He was made very unwelcome by Saturn, who was then on the throne, but once the god had departed from the earth he had an idea, and went out to every street-corner, where he continually shouted in a hoarse voice: 'Citizens of Betica, you think yourselves rich, because you have silver and gold.  Your delusion is pitiable.  Take my advice: leave the land of worthless metal and enter the realms of imagination, and I promise you such riches that you will be astonished.' He immediately opened a large number of the balloons he had brought and distributed his wares to anyone who wanted them.

     The next day, he went back to the same street-corners and shouted: 'Citizens of Betica, do you want to be rich? Imagine to yourselves that I am very rich, and that you are too.  Every morning, make

(it stops there, and it sure is a great way to end a bedtime story)

(the thought occurs to me that the Barthelme short story "the balloon" might offer a new reading of this story, too)