Anthology of Black Humor. André Breton
that she is a fine, plump thing, and that, precisely because she is more often asleep than awake, she would make an excellent spouse.
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He made all his discoveries more or less the way wild boars and hunting dogs root out salt-water and mineral springs.
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The man was working on a system of natural history in which animals were classified by the shape of their excrements. He distinguished three classes: cylindrical, spheric, and pie-shaped.
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In my view this theory corresponds in psychology to a very celebrated one in physics that explains the northern lights as the phosphorescence of herrings. [§]
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Long live those who have nerves as thick as cables!
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He marvelled at the fact that cats had two holes cut in their fur at precisely the spot where their eyes were. [§]
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If you paint a bull’s-eye on your garden gate, you can be sure that someone will take a shot at it.
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A. Why don’t you help your father?—B. How do you mean?—A. He’s quite poor.—B. Yes, but he’s a hard worker, and I don’t have fortune enough to make him a do-nothing.
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I once knew a miller’s boy who never removed his cap when he met me unless he had a donkey walking beside him. For a long time I could not explain it. At length I discovered that he regarded this company as a humiliation and was pleading for compassion; by removing his cap he seemed to want to evade the slightest comparison between himself and his companion. [§]
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“Many are less fortunate than you” may not be a roof to live under, but it will serve to retire beneath in the event of a shower. [§]
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I have long thought that philosophy will eventually consume itself. Metaphysics has already done so to some extent.
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He had given names to his two slippers.
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I would give something to know for precisely whom the deeds were really done, of which it is publicly stated they were done for the Fatherland. [§]
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Gallows with lightning rod.
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Autobiography: Not to be forgotten: that I once wrote down the question What are the northern lights? and left it in Graupner’s garret addressed to an angel, and next morning crept quietly back to collect the note. Oh, if only there had been some little rascal to reply to that note! [§]
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Once while on a journey I was eating at an inn, or rather a roadside shack, where they were playing dice. Sitting across from me was a fresh-faced young man who seemed a bit dissipated and who, without paying any attention to the people around him, whether seated or standing, was eating his soup; nonetheless, he tossed every second or third spoonful into the air, caught it again in his spoon, and swallowed it calmly.
What I find so singular about this dream is that it inspired my habitual remark: that such things cannot be invented, only seen (by which I mean that no novelist would ever have come up with the idea); and yet I had just invented it myself.
At the table where they were playing dice, a tall, thin woman sat knitting. I asked her what could be won at this game, and she answered: Nothing! When I asked her whether anything could be lost, she said: No! The game struck me as very important (February 1799).
—from Aphorisms translations marked [§] by R. J. Hollingdale
CHARLES FOURIER
1772 – 1837
His most favorable commentators, and even the most enthusiastic proponents of his socio-economic system, have been united in deploring the rovings of Fourier’s imagination. They have gone to great lengths to conceal the “extravagances” he indulged in, and have glossed over the “fantastic and rambling” aspects of his thought, which most often was so beautifully controlled. How can one explain the coexistence in a single mind of a preeminent gift of reason and a taste for vaticination taken to extremes? Marx and Engels, normally so harsh toward their predecessors, have paid homage to Fourier’s sociological genius. Marx observed, apropos the “Passionate Series” that form the cornerstone of Fourier’s work, that “it is possible to criticize such constructions (and this applies also to the Hegelian method) only by demonstrating how they are made and thereby proving oneself master of them.”* Engels presented him as “one of the greatest satirists of all time” and a consummate dialectician.† How could Fourier both satisfy such demanding men and disconcert almost everyone who has approached him with his dizzying ascents into things marvelous and uncontrollable? His theory of natural history—which held that the cherry was the product of the earth’s copulation with itself and the grape the product of the earth’s copulation with the sun—was deemed patently insane, and many say that his cosmology is no better. For in it, the Earth occupies only the insignificant place of a bee in a hive formed by a few hundred thousand starry universes, the totality of which constitute a biniverse, these biniverses being themselves grouped by the thousands into triniverses, and so on; creation proceeds by successive stages and gropings; our individual existence is subject to 1,260 avatars covering 54,000 years in the other world and 27,000 in this one, etc.
Nevertheless, Fourier’s cosmology, in which his most troublesome digressions are said to reside, had no small influence on the minds of certain nineteenth-century poets, in particular Victor Hugo. The latter became interested in it through contact with Victor Hennequin, and no doubt through his readings of the works of Eliphas Lévy (the former Abbé Constant), “who, on the road from divinity to magic, encountered the phalansterian library and put under Rabelais’s patronage the theory of series and that of attractions which are proportional to destinies.”* It is high time to establish precisely what this cosmology, as well as the other unusual theses Fourier propounded, owes or does not owe to hermetic philosophy—especially if we keep in mind that the Theory of the Four Movements is purportedly the “minutes” of lectures that its author gave in Masonic lodges under the Consulate. In any case, their constant intersection with the boldest plans for social transformation, whose rightness and viability have largely been demonstrated, throws them into extraordinary relief. Any attempt to segregate them from Fourier’s message, so as to make him more palatable, is a betrayal of this message, as is pretending not to know that in 1818 Fourier proclaimed the absolute need “to refashion human understanding and forget everything we have learned”† (which requires us first and foremost to break with universal assent and to do away with so-called “common sense”).
On two occasions, Baudelaire proved rather narrow-minded toward Fourier, by speaking of him without rendering him the honors he is due. “Fourier,” he writes in L’Art romantique
came along one fine day, far too pompously, to reveal to us the mysteries of analogy. I will not deny the value of some of his meticulous discoveries, though I think that his mind was too fond of material exactitude to avoid making mistakes and to reach the moral certainty of intuition directly …. Moreover, Swedenborg, whose soul was much greater [?], had already taught us that the sky is an enormous man; that everything—form, movement, number, scent, in the spiritual as well as the natural realm—is significant, reciprocal, converse, corresponding.
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