First They Came For The Esperantists.....
Or: Not So Quiet Flows The Esperantist
Or: Fahrenheit Zeitgeist
Paul continues a to be an a-mazing cornucopia of tid-bits about MBE. I tried channeling a "411" to get her number, but all I got was an automated out-of-body message from Elvis: Return to sender; no such number; no such Area Code. Why don't you drop her a line?"*
I was, however, able to dig up this by the faux Esquimaux and pathologist, Dr. Oliver Windy Homes:
En Block Meant
Man wants but little here at fifty below Fahrenheit
Little I ask; my wants are few;
I only wish a hut here below,
(A very plain igloo will do,)
And fifty words for snow
Unlike Paul and Hugh, I don't have "fifty score" or more of tastefully bound volumes and I didn't expect to find "Esquimaux" in the index of The Gulag Archipelago. I didn't, of course, but did run across "Esperantists, persecution of, 59":
"Among such lashing waves [of prisoners] as this, certain modest, changeless wavelets always got lost; they were little heard of, but they, too, kept flowing on and on:.........There were Esperantists - a harmful group which Stalin undertook to smoke out during the years when Hitler was doing the same thing."
* Somewhere in the NER archive is Paul's retelling of the tale of MBE's tomb telephone line. I think that it accompanied his observations regarding Joseph Cornell's models and "thinking outside the box."
