Manual of Painting and Calligraphy Read Online Free PDF Page A

permanently unstable spectrum in order to repeat the process, at once multiplier and multiplying.
    While alive, the same is true of man (once dead, it is no longer possible to know who he was): to give him a name is to capture him at a given moment in his earthly journey, to immobilize him, perhaps off-balance, to present him disfigured. A simple initial leaves him indeterminate, but determining himself in movement. I concede that I am being whimsical here, the fantasy perhaps of someone who has learned to play chess and thinks he can suddenly exhaust all the possible combinations (writing, or the calligraphy which precedes it, is my new form of chess), or it could be nothing more than the nearsighted man’s bad habit of peering at things, whereby he comes to discover, and for no other reason, what can only be seen up close. S. is an empty initial which I alone can fill out with what I shall know and invent, just as I invented the Senate and the Roman people, but in the case of S. the line will not be drawn that separates the known from the invented. Any name that starts with that initial could be S.’s name. They are all known and invented, but no name will be given to S.: the fact that all of them are possible makes it impossible to choose any one of them. I know what I am talking about and can prove it. One need only play on the sounds of the following names in order to appreciate the emptiness of a name once completed. Can I choose any of these for S(es)?: Sá Saavedra Sabino Sacadura Salazar Saldanha Salema Solomon Salust Sampaio Sancho Santo Saraiva Saramago Saul Seabra Sebastian Secundus Seleucus Sempronius Sena Seneca Sepúlveda Serafim Sergius Serzedelo Sidonius Sigismund Silvério Silvino Silva Sílvio Sisenando Sisyphus Soares Sobral Socrates Soeiro Sophocles Soliman Soropita Sousa Souto Suetonius Suleiman Sulpicius. Of course I can, but in choosing a name I would already be classifying and putting him into a specific category. If I were to say Solomon, he immediately becomes a man; if I were to say Saul, he becomes another man; I kill him at birth if I should opt for Seleucus or Seneca. No Seneca is capable of administering the SPQR today (Seneca, Lucius Annaeus Seneca [4 B.C. – A.D. 65], born in Cordova, Latin philosopher, was one of Nero’s preceptors; later he fell into disgrace and was ordered to commit suicide by opening his veins. Treatises:
De tranquillitate animi, De brevitate vitae, Naturales quaestiones, Epistulae morales
). The name is important yet is of no importance whatsoever when I read off once more, without pausing, all the names I have written: by the second line I lose my patience, and by the third I am completely satisfied with the initial. This is another reason why I myself intend to be a simple H. and nothing more. A blank space, were it possible to differentiate it from the margins, would suffice to say all that can be said about me. I shall be the most secretive of all and therefore the one who will say most about himself (give most of himself). (Give of himself: take from himself, waver.) Other people here will have a name; they are not important. Adelina, for example, I shall name. I only sleep with her. I neither know nor desire (to know) her. But I shall strip her of that name, just as I strip her of her clothes or ask her to strip, the day I find that name becoming the color of the paint inside the tube or a bubble on the windowpane. Then I shall call her A.
    Had S. not been managing director of the Senatus Populusque Romanus, he would not have sought me out to paint his portrait. He had the ironic courtesy to tell me this, with the negligent air of someone who excuses himself of some little foible, attributing it to alien motives which one only respects or tolerates out of disdainful forbearance. But in telling me he was also confessing to the first crack in his shell, before I had even considered a second portrait. In the boardroom of the SPQR there are three portraits of