Discrete Eureka!
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Monday, December 05, 2005
Novel by de Assis
Just started this novel by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis called 'The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas.' Hard to believe it was written in 1881. I'm only 6 chapters in (there are 160) but here's a snippet I took from near the end (I never skip ahead but for some reason the lack of strict narrative invited me)
***
Nose, conscience without remorse, you were very helpful to me in life...Have you ever meditated sometime on the purpose of the nose, dear reader? Dr. Pangloss' explanation is that the nose was created for the use of eyeglasses - and I must confess that such an explanation, up till a certain time, seemed to be the definite one for me. But it happened one day while ruminating on those and other obscure philosophical points that I hit upon the only true and definitive explanation.
All I needed, really, was to follow the habits of a fakir. As the reader knows, the fakir spends long hours looking at the tip of his nose with his only aim that of seeing the celestial light. When he fixes his eyes on the tip of his nose he loses his sense of outside things, becomes enraptured with the invisible, learns the intangible, becomes detached from the world, dissolves, is aetherialized. That sublimation of the being by the tip of the nose is the most lofty phenomenon of the spirit, and the faculty for obtaining it doesn't belong to the fakir alone. It's universal. Every man has the need and the power to contemplate his own nose with the aim to see the celestial light, and such contemplation, whose effect is subordination to just one nose, constitutes the equilibrium of societies. If noses only contemplated each other, humankind wouldn't have lasted two centuries, it would have died out with the earliest tribes.
I can hear an objection on the part of the reader here. 'How can it be like that,' he asks, 'if no one has even seen men contemplating their own noses?'
Obtuse reader, that proves you've never got inside the brain of a milliner. A milliner passes by a hat shop, the shop of a rival who'd opened it two years before. It had two doors then, now it has four. It promises to have six or eight. The rival's customers are going in through the doors. The milliner compares that shop with his, which is older and has only two doors, and those hats with his, less sought after even though priced the same. He's naturally mortified, but he keeps on walking, concentrating, with his eyes lowered or straight ahead, pondering the reasons for the other man's prosperity and his own backwardness while he as a milliner is a much better milliner than the other milliner...At that moment his eyes are fixed on the tip of his nose.
The conclusion, therefore, is that there are two capital forces: love, which multiplies the species, and the nose, which subordinates it to the individual. Procreation, equilibrium.
***
I'm sure I'll find a better representation later, but this seems to work. It's funny stuff.
***
Nose, conscience without remorse, you were very helpful to me in life...Have you ever meditated sometime on the purpose of the nose, dear reader? Dr. Pangloss' explanation is that the nose was created for the use of eyeglasses - and I must confess that such an explanation, up till a certain time, seemed to be the definite one for me. But it happened one day while ruminating on those and other obscure philosophical points that I hit upon the only true and definitive explanation.
All I needed, really, was to follow the habits of a fakir. As the reader knows, the fakir spends long hours looking at the tip of his nose with his only aim that of seeing the celestial light. When he fixes his eyes on the tip of his nose he loses his sense of outside things, becomes enraptured with the invisible, learns the intangible, becomes detached from the world, dissolves, is aetherialized. That sublimation of the being by the tip of the nose is the most lofty phenomenon of the spirit, and the faculty for obtaining it doesn't belong to the fakir alone. It's universal. Every man has the need and the power to contemplate his own nose with the aim to see the celestial light, and such contemplation, whose effect is subordination to just one nose, constitutes the equilibrium of societies. If noses only contemplated each other, humankind wouldn't have lasted two centuries, it would have died out with the earliest tribes.
I can hear an objection on the part of the reader here. 'How can it be like that,' he asks, 'if no one has even seen men contemplating their own noses?'
Obtuse reader, that proves you've never got inside the brain of a milliner. A milliner passes by a hat shop, the shop of a rival who'd opened it two years before. It had two doors then, now it has four. It promises to have six or eight. The rival's customers are going in through the doors. The milliner compares that shop with his, which is older and has only two doors, and those hats with his, less sought after even though priced the same. He's naturally mortified, but he keeps on walking, concentrating, with his eyes lowered or straight ahead, pondering the reasons for the other man's prosperity and his own backwardness while he as a milliner is a much better milliner than the other milliner...At that moment his eyes are fixed on the tip of his nose.
The conclusion, therefore, is that there are two capital forces: love, which multiplies the species, and the nose, which subordinates it to the individual. Procreation, equilibrium.
***
I'm sure I'll find a better representation later, but this seems to work. It's funny stuff.
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