Tags: how to find the electronic version of a book, various ebook collections, the Internet Archive, India's National Digital Library, Alfred Noyes, serendipity, soul-making, various (British) English dictionaries online

Electronic textual serendipity (or how the digital format gives books a new lease of life).


“The modern world was not alive to the tremendous Reality that
encompassed it. We were surrounded by an immeasurable abyss of
darkness and splendour. We built our empires on a pellet of dust
revolving round a ball of fire in unfathomable space. Life, that Sphinx,
with the human face and the body of a brute, asked us new riddles
every hour. Matter itself was dissolving under the scrutiny of Science;
and yet, in our daily lives, we were becoming a race of somnambulists,
whose very breathing, in train and bus and car, was timed to the
movement of the wheels; and the more perfectly, and even alertly, we
clicked through our automatic affairs on the surface of things, the
more complete was our insensibility to the utterly inscrutable mystery
that anything should be in existence at all.”
Alfred Noyes, The Unknown God, Sheed and Ward, London, 1934, pp. 176-177


Two weeks ago, I stumbled across a quote which struck me as being not only highly pertinent, but also as displaying great linguistic mastery. Placed as an epigraph to a book (Supernatural) by an author, Graham Hancock, who has co-written inter alia a book on the Sphinx of Giza, this rather enigmatic quote prompted me to make a note with a view to subsequently finding out some information about its author, Alfred Noyes, as the name could have been that of a Frenchman. This being no urgent matter at all, a fortnight elapsed before I decided that I needed a break from the boring texts I was writing and, somehow, among the many, many interests I do have, it was this quote which took precedence over all the other possible searches I could have undertaken...

So to look up info on Alfred Noyes, what I did was simply type the author's name in Searx.me, a meta search engine which re-dispatches search queries to Google and Bing and thus guarantees user anonymity*. I clicked on the entry published by the Encyclopaedia Britannica (here again, I am in favour of using the ‘underdog’ resource). Although there was really not much meat in that article, I decided that I knew enough about the author from what I had read there – as well as from the other snippets about Alfred Noyes displayed on Searx.me – that I could turn my attention to finding a digital version of the book from which the quote is taken; the book's title is The Unknown God.

There are three places I turn to whenever I am looking for the electronic version of a text: the Internet Archive, the Russian search engine Yandex (pdf plus the author's name and the title, the latter two between quotation marks) and b-ok. There are plenty of other websites which have yielded many interesting works whose existence I did not even know about, but listing them here is not the purpose of this entry. As anybody who has an account with the Internet Archive is allowed to contribute texts to its collections, some texts on the Internet Archive (which incidentally claims to be the repository for some ‘15,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts’) might be hard to find at times as a result of the uploader's improper cataloguing/tagging. Fortunately, this was not the case and I was able to retrieve a version of the The Unknown God which had been scanned by some Indian university library as part of the digitisation programme of the country's academic collections and which is available on the Internet Archive under the handle digitallibraryindia.

So I quickly went to the pages mentioned (176-177) by Graham Hancock and, surprise, surprise, the paragraph was indeed there, quasi in the bottom right corner: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.166623/page/n179.

Quotes are always taken out of context (which in Latin means to ‘weave together’), so I was particularly glad to be able to read the paragraphs that precede the quote, and which are as follows:


PHILOSOPHERS and prophets have told us that, if there
were no veil before our eyes, all human activities would
be paralysed. The modern poet who wrote

     “A veil twixt us and Thee, dread Lord,
         A veil twixt us and Thee
      Lest we should hear too clear, too clear
        And unto madness see”

was only elaborating the ancient affirmation “No man
can look upon God’s face and live.” If by any chance
this world were a place of gradual education where a
process of soul-making was being carried on, it is obvious

how much would be gained by beginning at the beginning
and working up through every grade of the difficult
ascent, learning all its laws by experience at first hand,
and assimilating what we had learnt into the very fabric
of our life. We could learn nothing of the real system
which we had to make our own if— at the outset — we were
stunned and overwhelmed by the vision of the sum of
things.

     But contemporary civilization, with its specialisms, and
its mechanized triumphs, its more and more vivid super-
ficial distractions and the increasing speed of its physical
movement, was beginning to mistake its own blindness for
a proof that nothing existed beyond it. Its members
were increasingly unaware of the real nature even of the
world immediately around them. They knew a con-
siderable number of scientific facts, but the portentous
nature of those facts made less impression on them than
the headlines in a daily paper. I felt that someone ought
occasionally to remind the confident speaker at a political
meeting that we were all in a very precarious position.

    We were being hurled through space, on a revolving ball,
at the rate of a thousand miles a minute, and if, at any
moment, we met (as millions of other celestial bodies have
met) some obscure and derelict wreck from another solar
system, our economic prosperity would concern us no
more, and it would be quite impossible for him to
“explore an avenue” or apply an “acid test” again.

    We might not expect a cataclysm any more than one
would expect a train-disaster in travelling through the
Swiss mountains. Like children, we might take trains
for granted. But there were obviously important aspects
of the journey which would be missed by a traveller who
buried his nose in a newspaper and never even thought
of looking out of the window. Not for us was that rapture
of a former generation;

    “Purple and crimson and scarlet, like the curtains of
    God’s tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the
    valley, every leaf, as it turned to transmit the sunbeam,
    first a torch and then an emerald.”

[The next paragraph is the beginning of the quote I inserted at the very top of this page.]

By the way, I did not have to type or even scan the preceding paragraphs; I simply copied them from the Déjà Vu version of The Unknown God, which is always offered as an option by the Internet Archive to the right of the description of the text. A feature which is very convenient if one needs to quote a few passages of a text (provided that it is available on the Internet Archive).

So what about serendipity in all of this? Serendipity is a positive and fortuitous occurrence, which in this case took place as follows. Although I had come across a reference to a book written by Graham Hancock on 15th October 2015, I happened to chance upon references to him twice last month. The second time was while I was trying to find, if I recall correctly, some textbook on investor relations – for some very, very strange reason, the French translation of Graham Hancock's and Robert Bauval's book on the sphinx [and the Egyptian civilisation] came up! So if a string of keywords having to do with financial communication and leading to considerations on the soul-making process is not serendipitous, what else would be serendipitous?

*Why should I let Big Brother Google know about my interests? Okay, okay, one could simply retort ‘Why bother writing a blog then?’ Good point, but let me answer that one another time, okay?!

PS I intend to read The Unknown God this weekend and I am sure that there will be far more insights of the same quality awaiting me inside that book.



Lausanne, 25th October 2018