Mr. President, Gentlemen of the Academy. You show me the honour of calling upon me to submit a report to the Academy concerning my previous life as an ape.The protagonist
My report will perhaps be somewhat different from the kind of thing you are used to, in so far as I am advised by the secretary for whom I, in turn, have an institutional duty to perform, that usually it is the duty of the Academy to receive reports of this nature from their members.The protagonist
I, however, may well be seen by you as representing the animal kingdom in general and am, to that extent, in any case pleased to satisfy your wishes. But please do allow me to say that I relegate the task of observation – or shall I say: the duty of observation.The protagonist
For if one observes things too closely there is the obvious danger that one’s perception becomes dulled.The protagonist
This confusion will lose all meaning for me; instead of this public gathering, the Academy will become a remote and pointless object of my study; the ten gentlemen in their white waistcoats will transform themselves into an array of freakish apparitions, the local fire-brigade complete with brass helmets will strike up an incomprehensible din, and finally I, your humble narrator, barely a month since my capture on the Gold Coast, will feel the untrammeled urge to romp and caper through it all.The protagonist
I know, gentlemen, I know the distance is infinite between one’s past life and one’s present one in which one is always beginning from scratch, so to speak.The protagonist
My anxiety serves only to point up the fact that one takes a stand against such flights of fancy only by looking seriously into the question of whether it is within the bounds of possibility.The protagonist
Your Apollonian form has thoroughly prevailed; despite all attempts at seduction, you have taken a stand against the wild bacchanale.The protagonist
I have an inherent weakness for investigating everything afresh.The protagonist
Nothing else was left for me to do but to flee from the human kind and, as it is put, to ‘go ape’. A beautiful expression of your poet’s, by the way, well constructed and sonorous.The protagonist