#robert fossier

Let us stop contemplating ourselves with delight, as we have done for thousands of years, the female sex even more than the male, and say with brutal clarity that man is an ugly and weak creature. To be sure, we might grant some grace to curves or rounded body parts, at least according to our own criteria of beauty, but how many ungraceful, if not downright ridiculous bodily elements we have: our feet with their useless toes, our rumpled and immobile ears, our heads much too small for the rest of our bodies (something that Greek sculptors as, friends of harmony, attempted to correct), man's genitals, or women's breasts! Is this purely a question of aesthetics? There is worse, however. Bipedal and plantigrade, man walks, runs, and jumps much less well than the quadrupeds; his lower members are quite atrophied and so weak they would make any carnivorous animal laugh; his fingernails are useless, and what remains of his teeth are not much better; the hair on his body is little protection from rain and snow; copulation forces him into grotesque postures (a defect that he shares, it is true, with many other mammals); with old age his stature shrinks, his flesh sags, his organs betray him. Still worse, his senses are extraordinarily weak: he cannot see very far and not at all at night; he perceives only a small part of the noises and sound waves that surround him; his sense of smell is completely null, and his tactile sense mediocre. His flesh is said to be tasteless and too salty, his smell is stomach-turning, or at least that is the point of view of other animals, those, precisely, whose grace, suppleness, sight, and perception astonish and charm us: the bird gliding on high, the fish swimming with the stream, the feline about to pounce. If we stopped admiring ourselves one thing would be clear. Man is a creature to which Creation was unfair. And yet…