Observations placeholder

The Link – Matthew Manning

By this time I was receiving nearly as many messages in foreign languages, as in English. The only difficulty here was that I was unable to translate them, as the only other language that I had any degree of knowledge of was French. This meant that I could not tell the content of the messages. The languages included Italian, German, Greek, Latin, Russian, Arabic and various Eastern tongues, as well as old English or Saxon. Many of the messages appeared at first sight to be fragments of existing works, or reproductions of someone else's work, although this is difficult to ascertain. I received, for example, a message that was signed "William Falconer 1801" that read:

"As some fell conqueror, frantic with success,
Sheds over the nation's ruin and distress;
So while the wat'ry wilderness he roamed,
Incens'd to sevenfold rage the foams;
And o'er the trembling pines, above, below,
Shrills through the cordage howls, with woe."

Perhaps this was written not by William Falconer, but by somebody else. Like so many of the scripts, it was irrelevant and apparently pointless. One of the messages I received in French read in prose form:

"Je dis: aux grandes maux les grandes remedes ou apres la mort le medecin qui dit que la patience est un remede a tous maux.  Marchand qui perd ne peut rire parce que les plus courtes folies sont les meillures. Jacques Chaumont. 1933." Translated it reads:

"I say: a desperate disease must have a desperate cure or after death comes the physician who says that patience is a plaster for all sores. Let him laugh that wins because the shortest follies are the best."

It reads like a string of proverbs written in French.