I found that I re-read many passages not (entirely) from lack of understanding, but also to savor or re-savor the understanding. The pores of my whole body opened their mouths at the same time, and tongues dangled limply from them.” “The inverted triangle formed by her torso, her thighs, and her upper arms was burned deep into the backs of my eyeballs and wherever I looked a flesh colored openwork forever overlaid my field of vision. When desire overwhelms, all of one’s boxes open: one’s body becomes a full range of open ports. By putting on clothes that as much as possible are identical and by having similar hairdos they manage to make it difficult to distinguish between one another.” Clothing and hairdos are boxes. “The reason men somehow go on living, enduring the gaze of others, is that they bargain on the hallucinations and the inexactitude of human eyes. I was being seen, but was the one seeing too.”īeing seen is oppressive: it opens the person to another’s awareness, and who knows what that is, or what it will do. It goes without saying that the model was myself. I wonder when he learned such a technique. An insolent eye that forced on me the role of being seen, but of not seeing. Various anxieties attend all four of these “the same time as I was looking at her, another I was looking at me looking at her.” An “eye that simply looked, expressionless. Running through the book is also the twins: seeing, and being seen, and their twins - seeing while being seen and seeing while NOT being seen. “Apparently the white nurse’s uniform had the function of stopping time.” For the box man, this is desire most prosaically for food (an unavoidable thing) but then for the nurse. The one who is in fact continuing to write these notes.” Abe doesn’t really say who that is, of course… is it you?Īt one point the text repeats itself - the start of the book repeats in the middle, although not in exactly the same words.ĭesire is ultimately what draws us out, that enforces the idea that that is an out into which to be drawn. “Of course, only one of the three of us really exists. That is, the writer is writing for the reader, and for himself, and so the reader and the writer are the same person. This leads naturally to an easy shift in perspective from a ‘real’ to a ‘fake’ box man, as well as the unsettling way the text leaps out at the reader, occasionally implicating him in this shift. With pure bluff alone, one can’t go on living in a box for three years.” The narrator certainly struggles with accepting or even grasping what the outer world is, and whether he is perceiving it (or himself) in a way that is accurate. They take too casually the meaning the box has for a box man. In the same way that we take for granted that our eyes, years, even mind convey accurately what the world is, “Generally people know too little about box men. “Looking out from the box, he sees through the lies and secret intentions concealed behind the scenery.” “The smoke that smelled like burnt sugar came from the soy factory and diligently filed away at the ends of the sharp shadows east by the evening sun, dulling the angles.” The box is our sensory apparatus and our perception as it includes the intellect. Putting all of that to the side, the sharp observations of the box man about his sensory experiences are striking, maybe pointing to the basic fact that the body is a box - a receptacle for our experiences and also our individual demarcation of them. Which one of us was not a box man? Who failed to become a box man?” “Now I’d like to have you think about this. (In a metaphysical sense, the idea incarnates.) At some point reading The Box Man one wonders: are the doctor (the ‘fake box man’) and the box man the same person? Later one decides it is a meaningless question, when one asks, “Is the author the box man, or am I, the reader, the box man?” All of these questions return to the what the box is, or more accurately, that is the act of putting on a box? It seems like it is simply being alive.
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