The Complete Essays (83 page)

That is a fine description of this construction, taken from a fine book. Yet even that, it seems to me, fails to enlighten us adequately about the
difficulty of such architecture. What silly vanity leads us to take products we can neither imitate nor understand, range them beneath us and treat them with disdain.
⁹⁴

Let us go further into such equalities and correspondences between us and the beasts. The human soul takes pride in its privilege of bringing all its conceptions into harmony with its own condition: everything it conceives is stripped of its mortal and physical qualities; it compels everything which it judges worthy of notice to divest itself completely of such of its own conditions as are corruptible – of all physical accidents such as depth, length, breadth, weight, colour, smell, roughness, smoothness, hardness, softness; it casts them aside like old garments; it clothes everything in its own condition, spiritual and immortal: the Rome or the Paris which exists in my soul – the Paris imagined in thought – is conceived in my imagination without size, without place, without stone, without plaster, without wood. Well, that self-same privilege seems evidently shared with the beasts; for, asleep on its litter, a war-horse accustomed to trumpet, harquebus and combat can be seen twitching and trembling as though in the thick of battle: clearly its mind is conceiving a drum without drum-beats, an army without arms, without physical body.

Quippe videbis equos fortes, cum membra jacebunt
In somnis, sudare tamen, spirareque saepe,
Et quasi de palma summas contendere vires
.

[You can, indeed, see vigorous racehorses, resting their limbs in sleep, yet often sweating and panting as though disputing the prize with all their might.]

The greyhound imagines a hare in a dream: we can see it panting after it in its sleep as it stretches out its tail, twitches its thighs and exactly imitates its movements in the chase: that hare has no coat and no bones.

Venantumque canes in molli saepe quiete
Jactant crura tamen subito, vocesque repente
Mittunt, et crebras reducunt naribus auras,
Ut vestigia si teneant inventa ferarum.
Expergefactique sequuntur inania saepe
Cervorum simulachra, fugae quasi dedita cernant:
Donec discussis redeant erroribus ad se
.

[Often hunting dogs lying quietly asleep, suddenly paw about, bark out loud and sharply draw their breath as if they were on the track of their prey. Even after they have started out of their sleep they still pursue that empty ghost of a stag as though they could see it fleeing before them, until the error fades and they come back to themselves.]

Guard dogs can be found growling in their sleep, then yapping and finally waking with a start as though they saw some stranger coming: that stranger which their souls can see is a spiritual man, not perceptible to the senses, without dimensions, without colour and without being.

consueta domi catulorum blanda propago
Degere, saepe levem ex oculis volucremque soporem
Discutere, et corpus de terra corripere instant,
Proinde quasi ignotas facies atque ora tueantur
.

[The dog, that fawning creature at home in our houses, often quivers its eyelids in winged sleep and starts to its feet as if it saw the faces and features of strangers.]
⁹⁵

As for physical beauty, before I can go any further I need to know if we can agree over its description. It seems we have little knowledge of natural beauty or of beauty in general, since we humans give so many diverse forms to our own beauty; [C] if it had been prescribed by Nature, we would all hold common views about it, just as we all agree that fire is hot. We give human beauty any form we fancy:

[B]
Turpis Romano Belgicus ore color
.

[On the face of a Roman. Belgian’s colour is ugly.]
⁹⁶

[A] For a painter in the Indies beauty is black and sunburnt, with thick swollen lips and broad flat noses; [B] there, they load the cartilage between the nostrils with great rings of gold, so that it hangs right down to the lips; the lower lip is similarly weighed down to the chin with great hoops studded with precious jewels; for them it is elegant to lay their teeth bare [C] exposing the gum below their roots. [B] In Peru, big ears are beautiful: they stretch them as far as they can, artificially. [C] A man still alive today says that he saw in the East a country where this custom of stretching ears and loading them with jewels is held in such esteem that he was often able to thrust his arm, clothes and all, through the holes women pierced in their lobes. [B] Elsewhere there are whole
nations who carefully blacken their teeth and loathe seeing white ones. Elsewhere they dye them red. [C] Not only in the Basque country do they prefer beautiful women to have shaven heads; the same applies elsewhere – even, according to Pliny, in certain icy lands. [B] The women of Mexico count low foreheads as a sign of beauty: so, while they pluck hair from the rest of their body, there they encourage it to grow thick and propagate it artificially. They hold large breasts in such high esteem that they affect giving suck to their children over their shoulders.
⁹⁷

[A] We would fashion ugliness that way.

Italians make beauty fat and heavy; Spaniards gaunt and skinny; some of us French make it fair, others dark; some soft and delicate; others strong and robust; some desire grace and delicacy; others proud bearing and majesty. [C] Similarly, while Plato considered the sphere to be the perfection of beauty
⁹⁸
the Epicureans preferred the pyramid or the square, finding it hard to swallow a god who was shaped like a ball!

[A] Anyway, Nature has no more given man privileges in beauty than in any other of her common laws. If we judge ourselves fairly we will find some animals less favoured than we are, others (more numerous) which are more so: [C]
‘a multis animalibus decore vincimur’
[we are surpassed in beauty by many of the beasts]
⁹⁹
– especially among our fellow-citizens, the denizens of dry land. As for the creatures of the sea, we can leave their beauty of form aside, since it has no point of comparison with ours; we are thoroughly beaten by them in colour, brightness, sheen and the general disposition of our members; beaten by the birds of the air, too, in all qualities. And [A] then there is that privilege the poets stress – the fact that we hold ourselves erect, gazing up to heaven, from whence we came:

Pronaque cum spectent animalia caetera terram,
Os homini sublime dedit, coelumque videre
Jussit, et erectos ad sydera tollere vultus
.

[The other animals look downwards to the ground; God gave Man a face held high and ordered him to look towards heaven and raise his eyes towards the sun, moon and stars.]
¹⁰⁰

That privilege is well and truly poetic! Some quite small animals gaze up to heaven all the time; camels and ostriches seem to me to have necks straighter than ours and more erect. [C] And which are these animals which are supposed not to have faces in front and on top, not to look straight ahead as we do nor, in their normal posture, to see as much of heaven and earth as we do? What characteristics of man’s body as described by Plato and Cicero do not equally apply to a thousand other animals!
¹⁰¹
[A] The animals most like us are the worst and the ugliest of the bunch: the one with an outward appearance and face closest to ours is the baboon;

[C]
Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis!

[That vilest of beast, the monkey – how like us!]
¹⁰²

[A] the one with inwards and vital organs closest to ours is the pig.
¹⁰³

When a think of the human animal, stark naked, with all its blemishes, natural weaknesses and flaws, I find that we have more cause to cover ourselves up than any other animal. (That even applies to the female sex which seems to have a greater share of beauty.) We could be excused for having borrowed from those which Nature has favoured more than us, decking ourselves in their beauty,
¹⁰⁴
hiding ourselves in their coats: wool, feathers, hide or silk.

We may note
en passant
that we are the only animals whose physical defects are offensive to our fellows; we are also the only ones to hide from others of our species when answering the calls of Nature. Also worth considering is the fact that those who know prescribe for lovesickness a good look at the totally naked body which is so much desired. To cool amorous passion, all you need to do is to be free to look at the one you love!

Ille quod obscoenas in aperto corpore partes
Viderat, in cursu qui fuit, haesit amor
.

[It has been known for a man to see his mistress’s private parts and to find his ardour pulled up short.]
¹⁰⁵

It is true that this prescription may result from a cool and delicate humour in Man; nevertheless it is a striking sign of our weakness that it is enough for us to frequent and know each other for us to feel disgust. [B] Ladies are circumspect and keep us out of their dressing-rooms before they have put on their paint and decked themselves out for public show: that is not so much modesty as skill and foresight.

[A1]    
Nec veneres nostras hoc fallit: quo magis ipsae
Omnia summopere hos vitae post scenia celant,
Quos retinere volunt adstrictoque esse in amore
.

[Fair women know this: they are all the more careful to hide the changing-rooms of their lives from those lovers they wish to hold and bind to them.]
¹⁰⁶

Yet we like all the parts of some animals, finding them so pleasing to our tastes that from their very droppings, discharges and excreta we make dainty things to eat as well as ornaments and perfumes.

Such arguments apply only to the common order of men; they are not sacrilegious enough to want to include those beauties, supernatural and beyond the common order, which can sometimes be seen shining among us like stars beneath a bodily and earthly veil.

Now even that share in Nature’s favour which we do concede to the animals is much to their advantage. To ourselves we attribute goods which are purely imaginary and fantastical; future, absent goods, which it exceeds our human capacity, of itself, to vouch for; or else they are goods which our unruly opinions attribute to ourselves quite wrongly, such as knowledge, rationality or pre-eminence. We abandon to animals a share in solid, palpable goods which really do exist: peace, repose, security, innocence, health… Health! the fairest and finest gift that Nature can bestow. That is why even Stoic Philosophy dares to assert that Heraclitus (who had dropsy) and Pherecydes (who had been infected by lice) would have been right, if they could, to barter their wisdom against a cure. By weighing and comparing wisdom against health they make it even more splendid than in another of their assertions. Supposing Circe (they say) had presented Ulysses with two different potions, one to make a madman wise, the other a wise man mad: rather than allow her to transform him from
human to beast, he ought to have accepted the one that would make him mad. Wisdom herself, they say, would have argued like this: ‘Leave me, forsake me, rather than lodge me in the bodily shape of an ass.’ What? Will philosophers forsake Wisdom, great and divine, to cleave to the veil of this earthy body?
¹⁰⁷
So we do not, after all, excel over beasts by wit and our power of reason but merely by our physical beauty, our beautiful colour, the beautiful way our members are arranged! For things like that we must forsake our intellect, our moral wisdom and what not!

Well, that is a frank and artless admission and I accept it. At least philosophers have admitted that all those qualities they make such a fuss about are fantastic and vain: even if beasts had all the virtue, knowledge, wisdom and contentment of the Stoic [C] they would still be beasts, [A] in no way to be compared to any man, however wretched, wicked or daft! [C] In fine, nothing is worth anything if it does not look like us. Even God has to become like us, to be appreciated – I shall go into that later.
¹⁰⁸
It is clear from this that [A] we do not place ourselves above other animals and reject their condition and companionship by right reason but out of stubbornness and insane arrogance.

To get back to the subject: we have been allotted inconstancy, hesitation, doubt, pain, superstition, worries about what will happen (even after we are dead), ambition, greed, jealousy, envy, unruly, insane and untameable appetites, war, lies, disloyalty, backbiting and curiosity. We take pride in our fair, discursive reason and our capacity to judge and to know, but we have bought them at a price which is strangely excessive if it includes those passions without number which prey upon us. [B] Unless, that is, we choose, like Socrates, to pride ourselves on the one noteworthy prerogative we do have over the beasts: Nature lays down limits and seasons to their lusts, but gives us a full rein – anytime, any place.