S_thyrsoideaJun 30, 2023

Huh. I just discovered Ernesto R. Sábato, whom it looks like I need to read.

"Existence, as with the character in _Nausea_, appeared to me like an insensate, gigantic and gelatinous labyrinth; and like him, I felt anxiety of a pure order, of a structure of polished steel, sharp and strong. I had already felt it like that in my adolescence, when I hurried towards mathematics, and now the phenomenon repeated itself, although with more force and desperation.

Show threadS_thyrsoideaJun 30, 2023
"In this way, I returned to that incorporeal universe, to the sort of refuge of a tall mountain where the noise of men did not reach, nor its confused contents. During various years I studied, frenzied, almost with furor, abstract things, giving me injections of translucent opium, living in the artificial paradise of ideal objects.
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"But when I lifted my head from logarithms and sinusoids, I encountered the faces of men. In 1938 I worked at the Curie Laboratory, in Paris. It still makes me laugh with self-disgust when I remember myself among electrometers, still supporting the spiritual narrowness and the vanity of those scientists, vanity that much more contemptible because it always dressed in phrases about Humanity, Progress and other abstract stylistic fetishes;
Jun 30, 2023 at 3:13amWeb
Show threadS_thyrsoideaJun 30, 2023

"while the war approached, in which that Science, which according to those gentlemen had come to liberate humans from all their physical and metaphysical maladies, would be the instrument of mechanized slaughter.

There, in 1938, I knew that my fleeting pass through science had ended. How I then understood the moral value of surrealism, its destructive force against the myths of an exhausted civilization, its purifying power, even despite all the charlatans who appropriated its name!"

Show threadS_thyrsoideaJun 30, 2023

Translated from the Spanish by D. Ohmans, from Sáboto's 1951 _Man and Mechanism: reflections on money, reason and collapse in our time_

http://webshells.com/spantrans/manmech.html

"Man and Mechanism" by Ernesto Sábato