The following essay is excerpted from “50 Card Tricks You Can Do from Beyond the Grave, or Lost Writings of Francis Bacon.” A maelstrom of controversy has surrounded the recently published manuscript, which was claimed to have been discovered by a Chicago butcher, Charles Gorgopopolis, within the entrails of a slaughtered pig.

Since Bacon died in 1626, that would make the pig over 375 years old, and there are other hints that the book may be apocryphal. In several of the essays the English philosopher refers to his readers as “youse guys” or “regular Joes,” and he makes frequent mention of the Sears Tower and microwave ovens. Although the ink was still wet when he brought the pages to the publisher, Gorgopopolis swore they were written by Bacon, or Bacon’s wife, or at the very least Shakespeare, or possibly Shakespeare’s wife — but definitely someone wearing a goatee.

Authentic or not, the book provides remarkable insight into a man described by some as “a genius for all time,” and by others (including the pig) as “a real stinker.”

“Love hurteth the heart as a dead mackerel doth offend the nostrils.” Thus spake the Greek general Alcibiades after Socrates had utterly refused his advances for that, as the philosopher saith, “They were not cash advances.” Indeed, for some, love and money are one, although love doth not pay quarterly dividends. Heraclitus hath called love, “That which one cannot step in twice without wiping one’s sandals.” Verily, Heraclitus was an ass.

We may distinguish four varieties of love: the love of parents for their children (when properly seasoned); the love of a boy for his dog; the love between two dogs, a lord chancellor and a bishop in garters; and most wondrous rare, the love between man and wife — so long as it be someone else’s wife. One may also speak of the love between a man and a suit of chain mail, but it would be wise to do so in a whisper if there are others present.

Yea, nor should we confound common love with true love. Common love, or as Chaucer hath writ, “a litel on the side, with bosoms,” is fit only for beasts and advertising account executives. True love, it will be seen, is always signaled by a rash upon the tongue and abdomen, to which diverse ointments may be applied without relief. If a man feel love for a lady, or even for his wife, he will not dip her hairpiece in a blood pudding or break a 16-piece stoneware dining set upon her brow, although when no one else is looking he may slap her lightly about the face and neck with his broadsword, in jest as it were.

Lastly is the love of heaven and things holy. As Dante hath made note in his crippled rhyme:

Oft hath it been said in truth, Dante was an imbecile, yet he had beautiful handwriting. For God, like the Marines, is looking for a few good men…better men than Tom Cruise, one can but hope. And the love of God will take all good men on a holy pilgrimage, or perhaps a hayride to Hell — the scriptures are not always clear. But if thou shouldst chance to make pilgrimage to Chicago, and if thou hath a taste for fine porklike killing floor remnants, be sure to pay homage to the Gorgopopolis Sausage Emporium.

In the bright, grassy Midlands of England rises the slightly fictional county of Wesson — a dark ink spot of tragedy among the happily blank pages that surround it. The air is heavier there, oppressive with the sense of eternal sadness and inescapable gloom. The sun does not shine on Wesson, for it has been banned by municipal decree. Neither flowers nor any other living things will bloom there, and the plowmen who homeward plod their weary way raise only Druidic stones from their cursed ash-gray fields. These stones their bony wives bake into a rough black bread very good for the soul but very bad for the teeth. Even this hard fare is thought too kingly by some of the sterner natives, who would rather suck an ice cube than eat a pagan meal. The inhabitants of Wesson know it is no use. They have given up.

Birds will not fly over the county, and the Wesson birds themselves don’t fly at all, remaining stoically perched in the bare trees that blight the countryside. Only when pierced by a sudden, ineluctable sorrow will they cry out, and then only with a mournful death-shriek as they plummet heartbroken to the ground. It was just such a luckless fowl that fell upon the brow of Tsk Durbeyfield where she sat weeping beneath a petrified oak. Though partly concussed and no child of fortune herself, Tsk took the rook in her arms and crooned a pitiful prayer into its dead eyes.

But the bird was not yet dead. With amazing alacrity it rallied to her tune and in its dying frenzy fastened its beak on her nose. For the world is as cruel as its maker, and He cares not a fig if a crow should peck a girl’s face off — even so beautiful a one as Tsk.

Without quite knowing why, she was ashamed. She had not sinned, but she was guilty. After all, there was a dead bird hanging from her nose, and that sort of thing simply was not done in Wesson — at least not in polite society. Like a woodland creature, Tsk knew instinctively that she was the living antithesis of Victorian hypocrisy and repression, yet she also sensed dimly, like the House of Lords, that through a succession of historically inevitable degradations her bucolic existence was fated to end in unearned suffering. And it occurred to her what a smashing novel it all would make, if only Sidney Sheldon had published in the 19th century, or Thomas Hardy in the 21st.

Then she thought of her family — of her father, Mr. Durbeyfield, known somewhat enigmatically as “Sir Speedy;” of her mother, known even more enigmatically as “Mrs. Durbeyfield;” and of her four younger sisters, Liza Lu, Little Lulu, Lockjaw and Old Black Joe. How could she face them now? She laughed bitterly when she recalled their despicable poverty. Why, they were so poor they could not even afford to give her a middle name, and she had to use her first name twice: Tsk Tsk. Was it any wonder she had fallen so far from grace? With girlish simplicity she reflected on the combination of socioeconomic factors that had run her like a rabbit into the briar bush of morality. It was all so confusing! Perhaps Lucifer Jones could help her unravel it. Dear Lucifer — so good, so strong…and so deathly dull. She covered her face with her burlap shawl and went to him.

“Tsk!” he exclaimed, “how good to see you at the vernal equinox. Isn’t it grand? I’ve developed a new method of corn blight control. Shall I tell you about it?” He did, and she fell asleep instantly. As he gazed at her veiled charms he felt a reckless impulse to make a new type of feed sack out of her shawl. But when he pulled the coarse cloth back from her face he recoiled in disgust.

“You — you aren’t the woman I loved,” he stammered.

“Then who am I?” Tsk replied huskily, like an ear of corn.

“Another woman in her shape, with a feathered carcass attached to her proboscis.” Though only a simple millionaire’s son, he knew his Latin, and could conjugate dead verbs in a way that melted a girl’s heart. Tsk wept anew as Lucifer strode briskly away from her.

“Where are you going?” she cried.

“To discover some new sort of threshing device made out of human teeth — but also to find a girl who doesn’t consort with dead specimens of any of various large glossy black oscine birds of the family Covidae and especially the genus Corvus. Farewell!”

Tsk, wounded to her soul, took comfort in the knowledge that she was not merely a backward Durbeyfield but an atavistic d’Urberville, one of a long degenerate line of anemic aristocrats whose skeletons rotted in decrepit Wesson tombs. How soothing this secret was! For when all was said and done the d’Urbervilles were only Durbeyfields, and the Durbeyfields only d’Urbervilles, and in the eyes of God neither mattered more than a dead crow.

For others, the word “vacation” evokes idyllic childhood memories of family togetherness and carefree summer days spent at some garden spot by a seashore or lake. For me, “vacation” has always meant a special family time, too — a time where families retreat far from civilization for the express purpose of torturing one another in an enclosed space without distractions. It doesn’t take a $90-an-hour Freudian to trace this feeling directly back to that fateful Luchs family trip to Lake Delavan, Wisconsin.

The year was 1964. Kennedy was freshly planted in Arlington National Cemetery, having been killed (as Oliver Stone has since informed us) by a conspiracy involving 93 percent of the American people and at least two of Donald Duck’s nephews, Huey and Dewey (although there is no direct evidence that Louie helped Oswald pull the trigger, he is now known to have been on a first-name basis with both Jack Ruby and Sirhan Sirhan). The Beatles were continuing their full frontal assault on America’s youth. Viet Nam was becoming the number one vacation spot for draft-age U.S. males.

The Luchses had just purchased a peculiar little foreign car, the Citroen 2CV. This vehicle is several sizes larger than a Tonka Toy and almost as powerful. It’s basically a Volkswagen Bug with an inferiority complex and only two cylinders. The man who sold it to us — a family friend later convicted of extortion and threatening to set off a bomb in the San Francisco Hilton, but that’s another story — fondly described the 2CV as “the perfect desert fighting machine.” He claimed that if you ran out of motor oil, you could always keep a Citroen going by filling the crankcase with ripe bananas. More than once our father caught us attempting to put this intriguing theory to the test.

The 2CV could seat two comfortably. In a pinch, four people could be squeezed in if they were willing to forego minor comforts like breathing. Our car held all nine of us: our parents, Robert and Jeannine, and (in descending order of age and location in the food chain), Hilde, Kurt, Murph, Helmut, Sarah, Rolf and Cara. Then there was our “luggage” (paper bags full of old clothes), the inflatable rubber boat, life preservers, a week’s worth of food and two cats, Leopold and Loeb.

The main excitement on the trip up came when one of the cats leapt from the back seat onto Dad’s back as he was negotiating a left turn. He screamed, “Get it off, get it off!” but this only amused his passengers and caused the cat to dig in its claws, piercing his Goldwater T-shirt and drawing enough blood to simulate a lovely tie-dyed effect. The rest of the ride is a blur to me now, since I spent most of it vomiting into a bag of Hilde’s knitting. Like most healthy American families, ours included both normal vomiters (NVs) and projectile vomiters (PVs). The difference is, if an NV keeps his head in a paper bag most of the time, his fellow travelers will only enjoy his experience vicariously, whereas there is no escape from the PV. Handing a PV a paper bag is like putting a cherry bomb in a coffee can: It simply makes for a messier explosion. I was an NV, but Sarah was a PV, and by the time we reached Delavan the interior of the car looked like a gutted animal.

On first sight Lake Delavan appeared to be North America’s largest mud puddle. At no point could you see bottom. Yet it was so shallow you could wade out for a quarter of a mile and never get your head wet. Not that you really wanted to get your head wet in Lake Delavan. It seemed to have become the final resting place for all the sewage, crumpled gum wrappers, rusty beer cans and broken glass in the tri-state area. Dull, sticky soap bubbles covered everything, bubbles that emitted a sickening stench when popped.

The cabin was owned by an old Polish woman from Chicago and was apparently furnished with cast-offs from the Warsaw ghetto. Before the electricity was turned on we wandered from room to room, weeping like icons at the shabbiness of it all. “What’s that crunching noise?” asked Rolf. “Sounds like Rice Crispies,” said Hilde. When the lights came on we discovered that the cabin was carpeted with dead flies. Helmut got Sarah to eat one by convincing her she would magically acquire the power of flight. She was indeed airborne for several seconds after jumping from the cabin roof, but problems with low visibility and faulty hydraulics forced her to make an emergency landing in some sumac bushes.

The only water sport we encountered at Lake Delavan was trying to get the toilet to flush. We quickly ascertained that any amount of toilet paper, even a single square, would cause an overflow. This more than anything else drove us away. Although we had paid for the entire week, by Thursday we had all had enough. We packed up and left late that afternoon with Dad even more dazed and confused than usual.

Dad was always in a world of his own, and never more so than when he was driving. He was very superstitious. He thought it was bad luck to look at a map before a trip…or during a trip…or at any time, for that matter. He also believed it was poor form to accost strangers with questions like, “Where the hell are we?” And he nursed an instinctive fear of policemen bordering on divine awe. (There must be genes for all these traits, because I regret to say they were passed on to me!)

Unfortunately, when the 2CV was fully locked and loaded with Luches it was unable to exceed 35 miles per hour, 10 miles below the minimum. A state trooper (who probably thought he had stepped into a remake of “The Grapes of Wrath”) soon pulled us over and advised Dad that he would have to leave the main highway and use back roads with lower speed limits the rest of the way. When we turned off the main road we got lost immediately and stayed lost. Mom held the thankless post of navigator. Her pathetic attempts to read the map by flashlight while in motion so infuriated Dad that he snatched the map away from her, wrapped it around the steering wheel with one hand and turned the flashlight on it with the other. This maneuver caused us to narrowly miss an A&W Root Beer truck.

The afternoon wore into twilight. It began to rain. The winter solstice drew near. I don’t remember when — or if — we ever got home, and I don’t want to remember. And I’ll thank you not to mention the word “vacation” again.

There’s a new feeling underfoot here in Quagmire, Florida, and the new feeling is…there’s nothing underfoot!

Thanks to a patented process called Irreversible Desiccation, great hollows have opened underneath our former residents to make room for you, and you, and millions more just like you — sleek young professionals with Tennis Elbow and PC Pinky, tender but tough, youthful but useless. Sinkhole & Sons Realty is looking for glistening Caucasian physiques in fishnet underwear just tight enough to hurt. For tanned bodies like yours that pose almost naturally, almost believably in the latest styles driving the latest cars (“The Predator,” “The Quasi-Motors Hunchback”) and drinking the latest drinks (“The Vodka Valium”).

Quagmire used to be the place where everyone with nowhere else to go had to go, but they’re all gone now, all of them. All the pensioners without the strength to endorse their ludicrously insufficient checks. All the unshaven old men and unshaven old women who used to shuffle from trash container to trash container saying “I remember…I remember…” when of course they couldn’t remember anything, not even their next of kin. All gone now. One minute they were standing helplessly in their shallow sandy gardens, propping themselves up with hoes and rakes and saying “I remember…I remember…” The next minute, as if by divine fiat, the earth opened beneath them, and in place of the elder ones stood a new development in modern living from Sinkhole & Sons: Limestone Luxury Condos.

If you’ve ever wanted to live like a blind cave salamander, groping for sightless white grubs in the slimy primordial dark, Limestone Luxury Condos could be for you. Close to Hell yet within praying distance of Heaven, these subterranean cavern units are also convenient to shopping at the ultra-modern Manglers Mall, where you will be treated like an honored prisoner of war by the brightly outfitted security personnel. Whether you eat your heart out at the Self-Serve Organ Surplus Warehouse, or mix metaphors and partners at the First Circle Bar and Grill (“Dante’s Bottomless and Topless Pit Stop”), you’ll appreciate the impersonal air of affluence that washes over you at Manglers Mall.

Get beneath it all. Come to Limestone Luxury Condos and sink out of sight with us into a spectral world where all necessities and toiletries must be lowered by rope. Listen to the mineral-laden water bleeding in from above as it drips endlessly from magnificently contorted ceilings onto pitted prehistoric floors, heedless of human concerns, ignorant of the latest fashions in jogging clothes, seeking only the warmth and quietude at the earth’s core.