3.28.2007

From Le Pèlerin (1929)

A Frenchman, an Englishman, and a German each undertook a study of the camel.
The Frenchman went to the Jardin des Plantes, spent half an hour there, questioned the guard, threw bread to the camel, poked it with the point of his umbrella, and, returning home, wrote an article for his paper full of sharp and witty observations.
The Englishman, taking his tea basket and a good deal of camping equipment, went to set up camp in the Orient, returning after a sojourn of two or three years with a fat volume, full of raw, disorganized, and inconclusive facts which, nevertheless, had real documentary value.
As for the German, filled with disdain for the Frenchman's frivolity and the Englishman's lack of general ideas, he locked himself in his room, and there he drafted a several-volume work entitled: The Idea of the Camel Derived from the Concept of the Ego.

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