Anyway, Fústar, I’d be remiss not to respond to your conflation of satanic simians and crass commercialism with this old gem, which has haunted my dreams for almost eight years.

Remember that one, Jason?

All too well, I’m afraid. Do you still have the one you got at Uncle Fun? Charlie Chimp was his name, wasn’t it? He was made of solid evil.

Why a monkey, of all things?

‘Night.

[Exit, pursued by a monkey]

Anyway, Fústar, I’d be remiss not to respond to your conflation of satanic simians and crass commercialism with this old gem, which has haunted my dreams for almost eight years.

I think the little guy in the post’s sidebar image responds to my conflation freakily enough! In fact, he may even be the very same cymbal-wielding, soul-stealing chimp.

The recursive frames and allusions to translation strike me as sly commentary about our means of preserving - and transmitting - knowledge, sacred or otherwise.

Interesting point. Jennings’ convictions about the nature of his condition seem to be based on a mashing together of Swedenborg (Latin) and Hesselius (German?).

In contrast, too, to the painstaking process by which he acquires this knowledge the voice of the monkey (and its message) “comes like a singing through [his] head”.

Not sure where I’m going with this, but it leads somewhere!

Remember that one, Jason?

We’re assured and comforted that..

Getting a hug from this plush Humbold’s wooly monkey is like getting a hug from the real thing.

I don’t want a hug from the real thing, the unreal thing, or that completely freaky stuffed monstrosity!

I keep returning to this sentence:

Than such a conclusion nothing could be, I insisted, less warranted; and not only so, but more contrary to facts, as disclosed in his mysterious deliverance from that murderous influence during his Shropshire excursion.

That had to have been written in German before our humble obedient translated it.

Nicely spotted. In the present age, Jennings would have been found with Eastenders on the telly.

Ha! Or, better yet, Fair City. I can think of few quotes that sum up its stupefying and depressing effects more that the above (and below):

There is in its motion an indefinable power to dissipate thought, and to contract one’s attention to that monotony, till the ideas shrink, as it were, to a point, and at last to nothing…

Actually, I’ve cracked it. The “monkey” is but a 19th century manifestation of QVC.

Also,

there’s a third level - as the account that reaches us is mediated through a former student of the good Doctor’s. Jennings >> Hesselius >> Our Editor.

Translating a polyglot text with as many protestations and disclaimers as can be found at the end of the letter!

The accounts of the monkey’s visitations are presented very vividly, but then we are getting them from a none-too-reliable narrator who in turn got them from a none-too-reliable source. That’s a lot of obfuscating.

Very true. And there’s a third level - as the account that reaches us is mediated through a former student of the good Doctor’s. Jennings >> Hesselius >> Our Editor.

Going back to shaky notions of self, the monkey clearly seems to threaten a destruction of the Ego. Jennings lives a scholarly life and his tormentor tries to induce in him a listlessness and torpor.

There is in its motion an indefinable power to dissipate thought, and to contract one’s attention to that monotony, till the ideas shrink, as it were, to a point, and at last to nothing…

Not only a physical death, then, but an intellectual one.