Anthology of Black Humor. André Breton

Anthology of Black Humor - André Breton


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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. [§]

      *

      If you paint a bull’s-eye on your garden gate, you can be sure that someone will take a shot at it.

      *

      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.

      *

      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. [§]

      *

      “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. [§]

      *

      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. [§]

      *

      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! [§]

      *

      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

      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.

      (We


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