In a Nutshell

Victor Pelevin “The Sacred Book of Werewolf”

Anyone who wishes to understand the nature of beauty should first of all ask himself: where is it located?  Can we say that it is somewhere inside the woman who is considered beautiful?  Can we say, for instance, that there is beauty in the features of her face?  Or in her figure?

Science tells us that the brain receives a flow of information from the sense organs, in this case from the eyes, and without the interpretations imposed by the visual cortex, this is simply a chaotic sequence of coloured dots, digitized into nerve impulses by the visual tract.  Any fool can understand that there is not beauty in that, so it doesn’t find its way into a man through his eyes.  In technical terms, beauty is the interpretation that arises in the consciousness of the patient.  As they say – in the eye of the beholder.

Beauty does not belong to a woman and it is not her specific quality – it is just that at a certain time of life her face reflects beauty, as a windowpane reflects the sun that is hidden behind the roofs of the houses.  And so we cannot say that a woman’s beauty fades with time – it is simply that the sun moves on and the windows of other houses begin to reflect it.  But we know that the sun is not in the windowpanes that we look at.  It is in us.

What is the sun?  I’m sorry, but that’s another mystery, and today I was only planning to reveal one.  And in any case, from the point of view of practical magic, the nature of the sun is absolutely irrelevant.  What matters are the manipulations that we perform with its light…

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Posted on November 20th, 2009 under Literature, Quotes • Tags: "The Sacred Book of Werewolf", beauty, fools, manipulation, mystery, reflection, Victor Pelevin. • • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback