The Face of Another Read Online Free PDF

of self-defense, according to which the loss of my face was not the loss of anything particularly essential? From one point of view, the problem was not the mask itself; there seemed rather to be at work here a challenge to the face and to the authority of the face. If I had not come to feel cornered, because of the collapsed Bach and your rebuff, perhaps I should have felt considerably more nonchalant and glib about my face.
    Yet, a deep black shadow grew in my heart, like India ink dropped in a glass of water. It was K’s idea that faces were a roadway between men. When I reflected on it now, if I had been struck with a rather unfortunate impression of K, it was not because of his complacency nor his insistence on medical treatment, but apparently because of this thought. If one accepted such reasoning, I who had lost my face was destinedto be shut up forever in a solitary cell … with no roadway … and so a mask became invested with a terribly profound meaning. My plan was to attempt to break out of my jail—on that I would stake my very being—and accordingly my present condition was a suitably desperate state. Indeed, what we mean when we say “terrible conditions” is conditions which we are aware of as being terrible. It was this awareness that I could not possibly accept.
    Even I recognize that a roadway between people is a necessity. I keep on writing these sentences to you precisely because I do fully recognize this. But I wonder if the face alone is the one and only roadway. I cannot believe it. My doctoral dissertation, which was on rheology, was properly understood by people who had never seen my face. Of course, with a mere scientific thesis one could not pretend to dispose of the matter of intercourse between people. Actually, what I ask of you is quite something else again. I want some sign of a completely meaningful human relationship—the lines are indistinct—call it heart or soul. Because this association is far more complex than a relationship between animals, who express themselves by their odors alone, I suppose facial expression is an adequate communicating roadway. Just as currency is a more evolved system of exchange than barter. But even currency is after all simply a means; it’s not almighty in every single situation. In some cases checks or money orders are more convenient; in others, jewels or precious metals.
    Isn’t it a preconception derived from habit to suppose that the soul and the heart are in the same category and can be negotiated only through the face? Isn’t it common to find a single poem or book or record that communicates with the heart far more profoundly than a hundred years of scanning faces. If a face were indispensable, a blind man couldn’t know such things as human characteristics, could he? I am more concerned about intercourse between human beings narrowing and stereotyped by too much dependence on the habit offaces. Actually, a good example is the stupid prejudice about the color of skin. To judge the soul’s roadway according to the color of a face is something describable only as an attitude which disregards the soul.
    E XCURSUS:
When I read this over now, I suppose I did not want to be bound by my face, but I had apparently been making transparent self-justifications. For example, I was first attracted to you through your face. And even now, when I think of the distance between us, the measure of it is the remoteness of your expression and nothing else. Yes, for quite some time I should have frankly imagined that our positions were reversed and that you were the one who had lost your face. Undervaluation and overvaluation of the face are equally artificial. So it would seem that I referred before to my sister’s wig in order to explain my feelings of not wanting to cling to my face, but I am dubious about the suitability of that reference. In short, isn’t my concern about my face simply a common adolescent interest in, and antagonism to, cosmetics?