Chapter 12 Poodle as a totem (2)

He is not a man without intelligence, although his intelligence is not of the kind that is valued by the geniuses of society.Even if his intellect is limited to manual work, in this respect he develops his talent beyond his prime mover ability.Even without culture, all tasks are successfully performed by his creativity, and it is this creativity in repair that separates the laborer from the artist.In the conversation, he made people understand that knowledge is not everything.For me who had succumbed early on to wanting to live like a nun for the rest of my life, God seemed very gracious in placing me in the hands of such a lovely companion, not an intellectual, but a good man .

I could have married a man named Grelier. Bernard Grelier was one of the few people who lived at 7 rue de Grenelle, and I was never afraid to reveal myself to him.Whether I told him "It's a novel that dramatizes a deterministic view of history" or "Go and grease the hinges of the garbage room," he didn't think much about it.I even thought to myself, what kind of incomprehensible miracle is it that the second urging voice can actually make him act? How can people do things they don't understand?Maybe such sentences don't need to be treated rationally, just like the stimuli circulating in the spinal cord can produce a response without going through the mind, and the command to lubricate may be just a matter of moving the arms and legs without the drive of the mind.

Violette Grelier is the wife of Bernard Grelier, the "power" in the Arden family.As early as 30 years ago, she worked as a maid in Arden's family. As their family became richer, her status was also promoted to housekeeper. After that, she became a queen who ruled an insignificant "kingdom". There's the cleaner (Manuela), the housekeeper (British), and Mr. Everything (her husband), who shares her big-bourgeois boss's contempt for the little people.From morning till night, she was as noisy, busy and pretentious as a woodpecker, berating her servants as if she were Versailles in the old dynasty, putting on airs and pompously before Manuela, talking Nonsense about virtue being everywhere at work and analyzing for her what cultivated manners should look like.

"She must have never read Marx," Manuela said to me one day. Such a careful observation, and the words of a Portuguese maid who knew nothing about philosophical research, shocked me.Certainly not, and Violet Grelier must have not read Marx on the grounds that Marx was not on any of her lists of cleaners to wipe rich people's silver.The price she paid for not being educated in Marx's theory was that her life was occupied by an endless catalog of starches and rags. It can be said that I married well. And, not long after, I admitted my blunder to my husband.Deep Thought II

worldly cat modern totem indirect decoration Anyway, this is the situation in our house.If you want to know about our family, just look at the cats.My two cats are two fat sacks filled with extravagant croquettes, and they don't have any interesting interrelationships with the crowd.They just crawl from couch to couch and leave their hair all over the place, and in fact, no one seems to understand that they don't have a shred of affection for anyone.Intellectually I find an interesting point that cats' only role is to act as ornament, but our cats sag so much that it doesn't suit them.

My mother, who had read all of Balzac, who would quote Flaubert at dinner, made the point every day that education was a lie.Just seeing her attitude towards cats is enough.She was dimly, half-consciously aware of their decorative potential, but she persisted in speaking to them as if to a person, a lamp, or an Etruscan statue, She would never have such an idea.In fact, young children seem to believe that all moving things have souls and desires until they reach a certain age.My mother is no longer a child, but apparently she doesn't think the Constitution and Parliament (the names of the two cats) are as incomprehensible as a vacuum cleaner, and I admit that the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a cat is that cats can Feel pleasure and pain.But does that mean they will have more ability to communicate with people?Not at all.This prompts us to treat them with the same care as a fragile object.When I hear my mother say that "Constitution is a proud and sensitive female cat" and the cat presents herself sprawled out on the couch from overeating, I go I can't help but laugh.But if we consider the hypothesis that the cat has the function of a modern totem, like a symbolic avatar and patron saint of the home, benevolently reflecting the members of the family, then my conclusion is obvious.My mother turned cats into what she wanted us to be, and we were not.No one is more proud and sensitive than the three members of our family mentioned below: Dad, Mom and Colombe.They are pure cowards, insensitive people, hard-hearted people.

Simply put, I think cats are modern totems.Even after discussing and giving all kinds of speeches about evolution, about culture, and a lot of words with "hua", man has not made much progress since the beginning: man always thinks that he did not come by accident come to this world, and think that it is mostly the concern of a merciful God for their fate.