Robert Louis Stevenson wants you to buy Viagra.

I'm on record supporting torture, maiming, and execution for spammers. Make me your king and I'll hold public stonings, drawing and quarterings, even Roman-style fights against lions for the folks that continually attack my inbox and comments section. I will scour the internet looking for the very most painful methods of punishment known to man. I'll make Qusay Hussein look like Gandhi and Idi Amin like a Teletubbie. The worst I can find will be reserved for the people who send me spam about spam-blocking software. Oh yes, night and day will their screams echo down the tower stairs.

However, once I begin my Jacobin purges of the mass-mailers, I will probably show some grudging leniency toward the ones who inadvertently lead me to beauty. One such spam just plopped down into my inbox, having managed to avoid the Bayesian filter. Even so, they are easy to spot and the only thing that kept me from just instantly deleting it was the subject line: "whenever pilewort." Pilewort, a word that makes me chuckle for no apparent reason, is an herb/weed that grows wild here in North Carolina, recognizable by its distinctive flowers that stay closed while in full bloom.

But the pilewort reference isn't what would save this spammer from the acid vats in the future People's Republic of Apostrophia, that fair land of proper grammar and free cable TV. Following a string of nonsense words and a link for yet another online pharmacy came a 4-5 sentence passage that made no particular sense, but was put together just beautifully all the same. Figuring there was no way this wasn't ripped from a literary source somewhere, I googled a five-word snatch of it. Lo and behold, it was the middle of a paragraph from Robert Louis Stevenson's Across the Plains.

I've never read anything by Stevenson previously, but I probably will now. Most (and likely all) of his oeuvre is online, having long ago passed into the public domain. Here's the full paragraph with asterisks marking off the section from the email:

There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life: the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognise him. It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though *perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and the days are moments. With no more apparatus than an ill-smelling lantern I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands: seeking for that bird* and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news.

Damn. Now that is just gorgeous.