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In the year 30070 a revolutionary discovery took place. It is from that event, and in honour of it, that our present time-scale originates. It is difficult at this time – 300 n-years later – to be sure of the events; even something as simple as the fabular meaning of n.y. tends to be obscured in the minds of the vulgar by still older fables and associated locutions. The present writer has met with lower orders who believe the letters to stand for ‘new years’ or ‘nuclear years’, under the impression that our time-scale derives from a supposed atomic disaster occurring in year 1 of our era. In so far as it is possible to reconstitute the past from the scanty remains, something resembling the following account took place.
A man, whose name is lost but who must have been a genius of outstanding proportions for that age, made a discovery of an exceedingly simple kind. In those days there still existed a rudimentary science called, ‘psychoanalysis’. The term was made up of two parts: ‘psyche’, referring to an undeveloped mind or personality which was believed to have given rise to the so-called ‘psyche’; and ‘anal’, derived from an anatomical structure, notably that part of it concerned with the evacuation of the waste products from ‘eating’ – a habit very similar to that which can be observed in the ‘domesticated’ forms that we have derived from them. As far as we can now tell – or even conjecture from certain archaic vestigial survivals of our domestic forms – the psychoanalysts, for so I shall call them for short, connected their excretions – quite correctly – with what they ‘ate’, and developed elaborate rituals as part of the religion of cleanliness, which were supposed to placate, or render harmless, the remains of what they had devoured. If the destructive rituals failed, as was supposed to have happened on those
occasions when disease wiped out a few thousands of them, redoubled efforts were made to increase the efficiency of the cleansing ri