Death and the Metaphor
Before the first paragraph is over, the author is diving deep into the wonderful world of metaphor. His name is Ruben Blume and he’s an historian which means with his eventual demise he will himself become historical. It’s just a quick leap from there to here:
“Lawyers die and don’t become the law, doctors die and don’t turn into medicine, but biology and chemistry professors pass away and decompose into biology and chemistry, they mineralize into geology, they disperse into their science, just as surely as mathematicians become statistics.”
Dutch Colonialism
To understand this example of the use of metaphorical imagery it helps to know what Dutch Colonialism architecture looks like. But, frankly, that knowledge is far from essential. It is actually beside the point because it is not the style but the reaction of the narrator to the style:
“Look at a Dutch Colonial from the front, it looks like a house. Look at a Dutch Colonial from the side, it looks like a barn. This bothered me. It made me uncertain as to whether we were humans or animals.”
Dr. Morse
The narrator finds one aspect of a certain Dr. Morse most perplexing. This is not surprising since this characteristic is not exactly highly populous. He’s a man who is fully aware of his own limitations but simply doesn’t give a darn:
“He wore his averageness lightly, almost proudly, like a transparent scholar’s gown, underneath which he was nakedly an administrator.”
So, What’s the Deal with History?
Two schools of thought exist on the subject of history. One takes the Nietzschean eternal recurrence approach and is generally held to be the conventionally shared perspective. And the other doesn’t:
“I should just conclude with the antagonism between the belief that history never repeats itself and the belief that it always repeats itself, in the very circular eternity of this table.”
A Cocktail Party
The dense metaphorical forest that you are about to tread into is actually just a description of a cocktail party that takes a slight left turn with the appearance of smoking pipes and the material one stuffs down into them. Call it tobacco if you wish but it sounds suspiciously more sinister:
“In retrospect, it was all just a vain experiment in blending: drinking the Ms. Gringling–served gin and smoking the sweet-spicy burley that burnt my throat and stung my eyes and clouded the head that joined them, while the body wore suits whose plaid was as wide as the mullions of the window in brilliant orange-yellows like the autumn outside.”
