Queueing rest of Beckett post-Wittgenstein, Hume, Locke, Malebranche
They are mostly artists of various sorts; painters, or sculptors, or indigent students, or teachers of languages, or poets, or fugitive French politicians, or German philosophers. Their mental tendencies, however heterodox at times, are still very fine and spiritual upon the whole; since the vacuity of their exchequers leads them to reject the coarse materialism of Hobbes, and incline to the airy exaltations of the Berkeleyan philosophy. Often grouping in vain in their pockets, they can not but give in to the Descartian vortices; while the abundance of leisure in their attics (physical and figurative), unite with the leisure in their stomachs, to fit them in an eminent degree for that undivided attention indispensable to the proper digesting of the sublimated Categories of Kant; especially as Kant (can't) is the one great palpable fact in their pervadingly impalpable lives.
The magpie ended this performance of its own accord and with a few flaps of its wings, reached the bust of Immanuel Kant; on top of the stand, to the left, was a little perch on which the bird landed.
Immediately, a strong light illuminated the skull from within, and the casing, which was excessively thin, became completely transparent from the line of the eyebrows upwards.
One divined the presence of countless reflectors, placed facing in every direction inside the head. So great was the violence with which the bright rays, representing the fires of genius, escaped from their incandescent source.
Repeatedly the magpie took flight, to return immediately to its perch, thus constantly extinguishing and relighting the cranial dome, which alone burned with a thousand lights, while the face, the ears and the nape of the neck remained in darkness. Each time the bird's weight was applied to the lever, it seemed as though some transcendent idea was born in the thinker's brain, as it blazed suddenly with light.
