Hermes

I have before me Derrida's book-that-is-not-a-book Dissemination.  It is of course not the same book I am reading now that I read long ago, carefully and obsessively, at the Edge in Memphis  over the course of what must have been three weeks.  Out of a sense of the faint resemblance of the book I read now to that past book by the same name, I try to study now.  A recap of some inaccessible past at best.

Page 84-- Plato's Pharmacy, I, 3: "The Filial Inscription: Theuth, Hermes, Thoth, Nabu, Nebo"

Three quotations, unforgettable, or rather, very forgettable, so I try to reconstitute them here.  Or some trace thereof.

Universal history continued to unroll, the all-too-human gods whom Xenophanes had denounced were demoted to figures of poetic fiction, or to demons-- although it was reported that one of them, Hermes Trismegistus, had dictated a variable number of books (42 according to Clement of Alexandria; 20, 000 according to Iamblichus; 36,525 according to the priests of Thoth--  who is also Hermes) in the pages of which are written all things.  Fragments of this illusory library, compiled or concocted beginning in the third century, go to form what is called the Corpus Hermeticum...

---Jorge Luis Borges, "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal"

That's it, I am going to sleep now.