" As the gypsy reached this point of the story Velásquez pulled out his tablets and made some notes. The story-teller then turned to him and said, ‘Señor duque perhaps intends to engage in some interesting calculations? My tale might distract him from them.’ ‘Not at all,’ said Velásquez. ‘It’s your story which I am thinking about. Señor Iñigo Soarez will perhaps meet someone in America who will tell him the story of someone who has also a story to tell. So as not to lose my way, I have thought up a scale of relations which is like the one used for sequences given by recurrence relations, so called because they ultimately depend upon the first terms. Please go on.’ The "

― Jan Potocki , The Manuscript Found in Saragossa