Against the grain

[Guest guest]

Kate:

> Either of us, and most other folks with autism/Asperger's, would

have understood a boy named Ireneo Funes, in the famous short

story " Funes the Memorious " by Borges (1899 - 1986)

Yes, though perhaps not to that extreme.

Someone I identified with was Des Esseintes in Huysmans' " Against the

Grain " when I read it in my early 20's. Can be read online here:

http://eldritchpress.org/jkh/rebours.html

The first couple of chapters are really entertaining; even more so

when I re-read them now. Besides his his " liqueur organ " with which

to create a symphony of tastes, here are some rather funny Aspie/HSP

indicators:

From chapter 1:

" ..what endless inquiries had he not instituted, what lengthy

lucubrations had he not indulged in, before finally entrusting his

new home to the hands of the upholsterers! He had long been an expert

in the right and wrong combinations and contrasts of tints. "

" Then, in the days when Des Esseintes still deemed it incumbent on

him to play the eccentric, he had also installed strange and

elaborate dispositions of furniture and fittings, partitioning off

his salon into a series of niches, each differently hung and

carpeted, and each harmonizing in a subtle likeness by a more or less

vague similarity of tints, gay or sombre, refined or barbaric, with

the special character of the Latin and French books he loved. He

would then settle himself down to read in whichever of these recesses

displayed in its scheme of decoration the closest correspondence with

the intimate essence of the particular book his caprice of the moment

led him to peruse. "

" What he wanted was colours the effect of which was confirmed and

strengthened under artificial light; little he cared even if by

daylight they should appear insipid or crude, for he lived

practically his whole life at night, holding that then a man was more

truly at home, more himself and his own master, and that the mind

found its only real excitant and effective stimulation in contact

with the shades of evening; moreover, he reaped a special and

peculiar satisfaction from finding himself in a room brilliantly

lighted up, the only place alive and awake among surrounding houses

all buried in sleep and darkness "

From chapter 2:

" The husband's duty was to keep the rooms clean and fetch the

provisions, the wife's to attend to the cooking. Their master gave up

the first floor of the house for their accommodation, made them wear

thick felt shoes, had double doors installed with well-oiled hinges

and covered the floors with heavy carpeting so as to prevent his

hearing the faintest sound of their footsteps overhead.

" Then he arranged with them a code of signals, fixing the precise

significance of different rings on his bell, few or many, long or

short, and appointed a particular spot on his writingdesk where each

month the account books were to be left; in fact, made every possible

disposition so as to avoid the obligation of seeing them or speaking

to them more often than was absolutely indispensable.

" More than this, as the woman must needs pass along the front of the

house occasionally on her way to an outhouse where the wood was

stored and he was resolved not to suffer the annoyance of seeing her

commonplace exterior, he had a costume made for her of Flemish

grogram, with a white mutch and a great black hood to muffle face and

head, such as the Béguines still wear to this day at Ghent. "

" He fixed the hours of meals, too, in accordance with a never varying

schedule; indeed his table was of the plainest and simplest, the

feebleness of his digestion no longer permitting him to indulge in

heavy or elaborate repasts. "

" These meals, the details and menu of which were settled once for all

at the beginning of each season of the year, he took on a table

placed in the middle of a small room communicating with his study by

a padded corridor, hermetically closed and allowing neither smell nor

sound to penetrate from one to the other of the two apartments it

served to connect. "

From chapter 7:

" Since his earliest childhood he had been tormented by inexplicable

repulsions, shuddering spasms that froze his backbone and clenched

his teeth, whenever, for instance, he saw a servant-maid in the act

of wringing out wet linen. These instinctive dislikes had never

changed, and to that day it caused him genuine suffering to hear a

piece of stuff torn in two, to rub his finger over a lump of chalk,

to stroke the surface of watered silk. "

From chapter 10:

" Years ago he had trained himself as an expert in the science of

perfumes; he held that the sense of smell was qualified to experience

pleasures equal to those pertaining to the ear and the eye, each of

the five senses being capable, by dint of a natural aptitude

supplemented by an erudite education, of receiving novel impressions,

magnifying these tenfold, coordinating them, combining them into the

whole that constitutes a work of art. "

" Little by little, the arcana of this art, the most neglected of all,

had been revealed to Des Esseintes, who could now decipher its

language,--a diction as varied, as subtle as that of literature

itself, a style of unprecedented conciseness under its apparent

vagueness and uncertainty. "

More in the online book, including a dinner where not only the

decorations are black but also the food and the servants.

Though it gets rather tiresome in the middle and depressing towards

the end as he becomes more and more imbalanced.

Inger