Gratituditynesshoodshipcy!Giles Goat-Boy, in addition to everything else, is about lenses. If you understand the last quote about lenses, you grasp as much of Giles Goat-Boy as is possible. We'll dismantle it: All lenses do distort. It is the nature of lenses. Is it the nature of sight? Do we distort things in order to see them? Is the conversion of photons into the visual imagery we have in our minds distortion?
Something I don't understand is this, I said carefully. How can a person stand it, not to be...marvelous?
Failed, failed, failed! I look about me, and everywhere see failure. Old moralists, young bootlickers, unsuccessful writers; has-beens, would-bes, never-weres; failed artists, failed editors, failed scholars and critics; failed husbands, fathers, lovers; failed minds, failed bodies, hearts, and souls--none of us is Passed, we all are Failed!
It no longer matters to me whether the Revised New Syllabus is published, by this house or any other. What does the Answer care, whether anyone "finds" it? It wasn't lost! The gold doesn't ask to be mined, or the medicine beg to be taken; it's not eh medicine that's worse off when the patient rejects it. As for the Doctor--who cares whether he starves or prospers? Let him go hungry, maybe he'll prescribe again! Or let him die, we have prescription enough!
Let him laugh, even, that I've swallowed in good faith the pill he made up as a hoax: I'm cured, the joke's on him! One comes to understand that a certain hermit of the woods is no eccentric, but a Graduate, a Grand Tutor. From all the busy millions a handful seek him out, thinking to honor and sustain him; we bring him cash and frankincense, sing out his praises in four-part harmony, fetch him champagne and scares off the locusts he'd have suppered on; the wine makes him woozy, he upchucks the soup; he can't smell the flowers for our perfume or hear the birds for our music, and there's not a thing to spend his money on. No wonder he curses us under his breath, once he's sober again! And thinking to revenge himself with a trick, he puts on a false face to scare us away. We had asked for revelations; he palms off his maddest dreams. "Show us Beauty," we plead; he bares his rump to us. "Show us Goodness," we beg, and he mounts our wives and daughters. "Ah, sir!" we implore him, "Give us the Truth!" He thrusts up a forefinger from each temple and declares, "You are cuckolds all."
And yet I say the guller is gulled, hoist is the engineer: the joke's on the joker, that's the joker's joke. Better victimized by Knowledge than succored by Ignorance; to be Wisdom's prey is to be its ward. Deceived, we see our self-deception; suffering the lie, we come to truth, and in the knowledge of our failure hope to Pass.
Publish the Revised New Syllabus or reject it; call it art or artifice, fiction, fact, or fraud: it doesn't care, its author doesn't care, and neither any longer do I. I don't praise it, I don't condemn it; I don't ask who wrote it or whether it will sell or what the critics may make of it. My judgment is not upon the book but upon myself. I have read it. I here resign from my position in this house.
However I was not supposed to infer that because all lenses distorted ("Your own included" he said, perhaps unable to see that I wore none), nothing could be truly seen; all that was necessary was to compensate for optical error, and for this he relied, in his own work, on the lens in his hand, which he knew to be accurate.
Your own included.
perhaps unable to see that I wore none.
Does the boy wear a lens? Barth phrases it very carefully, and only in terms of sight. "Unable to see that I wore none." What lens could make the sight of other lenses impossible? What lens could make you see lenses where there aren't any?
We are presented with two possibilities: either the boy is wearing a lens and cannot see his own lens and the old man speaking can see his lens or the old man's lens is distorted and he truly cannot see that the boy is not wearing a lens.
Is this getting to be a bit much what with all the lenses and wearings and distortions? Maybe you should switch to a new pair of glasses. I guarantee there is one pair out there that will make what I'm saying here sound like pure genius. There are also pairs to make you think it's drivel, ludicrous, foolishness, insanity, wisdom, common sense, nothing special, everything special...
The calibration of these delicate little things we call eyes (which are nothing less than lenses) is a process we have had very little to do with on the overt level.
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