What’s my life worth? In the end (I don’t know what end)
One man says: “I earned three hundred thousand dollars.”
Another man says: “I earned three thousand days of glory.”
Yet another says: “I had a clear conscience and that’s enough.”
And I, should somebody ask what I did,
Will say: “Nothing except look at things,
Which is why I have the whole Universe in my pocket.”
And if God should ask: “And what did you see in things?”
I’ll answer: “Just the things themselves. That’s all you put there.”
And God, who after all is savvy, will make me into a new kind of saint.
Fernando Pessoa
The Proper faq
What is the Proper?
- meditations on aesthetic creation.
- love poems to some of history’s most influential artists.
- a celebration of form.
- a blurring of fact and fiction.
- an Ovidian baptism in passion and play.
- a mythopoeic study of the relationship between art and life, spirit and flesh.
- an exploration of the transference of values from the past age of religion to the age of art.
- a narrative response to the questions, How are artists made? How is art made?
- a frolicking rollicking good time.
What should I be smoking when I read it?
We recommend Montecristo No. 4, or, in the United States where Montecristos are illegal, opium.
Why should I read the Proper?
Readers have written to us with many helpful uses they’ve made of it:
· onanistic aid
· bowel movement regulation
· onanistic aid
· laxative
· bowel movement regulation
· onanistic aid
· emollient.
Why was the Proper written?
As an onanistic aid.
Who should read the Proper?
Miscreants, ribalds, ministers, ex-miscreants or miscreants-in-training, ex-ribalds or ribalds-in-training, ministers.
Who is responsible?
Fred Cheever.
When is the best time to read the Proper?
7:21pm.
When was it written?
7:21pm.
How could it have been written at 7:21pm?
Inspiration.
Where is the best place to read the Proper?
On the Paris Métro, line 13, between Liège and Gabriel Péri - Asnières - Gennevilliers, bound toward Gabriel Péri - Asnières - Gennevilliers.
Where was it written?
In the southernmost cubicle in the downstairs women’s washroom at Pasha’s in London (1 Gloucester Road SW7 4PP - 0871 4260250).
How should I read the Proper?
There are many ways to read the Proper. No one way is definitively right, but many ways could be considered gauche.
You can pretend you’re Catholic and read each Proper on its designated calendar date (e.g. Vico on January 2, Ovid on January 7, Cranmer on January 10, and so on); this has the benefit of regulating your life through a liturgical rhythm and is, frankly, the proper way to read the Proper. The Proper has its Propers unevenly distributed so as to ensure regulation doesn’t become too much like, as they say in Germany, Verstopfung.
If you’re a libertine, however, feel free to rebel against the Catholic method.
In order to enhance reader satisfaction and meet or exceed our customer service targets, we also have below 10 “vacation tours”—specially planned trips to thematically homogeneous saintly areas to make your life easier and give you “een weinig gluur,” as they say in Amsterdam.
The Council of I’s Round Table
Auden, Yeats, Sophocles, Chaucer, Solomon, Plato, Sterne, Montaigne or G Eliot, Homer, Carroll, Nietzsche, Malfeasance of Epics
The Freudian
Tchaikovsky, Austen, Sappho, Kafka, Auden, Caravaggio, Kierkegaard, Hopkins, Eckhart-Weil, Woolf, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rilke, Van Gogh, G Eliot, Borges
The Irish-American
Auden, Hitchcock, Frost, Yeats, Gould, McCarthy, Kubrick, Melville, TS Eliot, Joyce
The Athens-Jerusalem
David, Euripides, John, Plato, Sophocles, Homer, Paul, Sappho, Aeschylus, Isaiah, Job, Heraclitus, Moses
The Lunatic
Velazquez-Vermeer, da Vinci, Blake, Gould, Dickens, Isaiah, Malfeasance of Bach, Job, Beatles, Sterne, Malfeasance of the Three Weird Sisters, Moses
The B List
Bach, Baudelaire, Beatles, Beethoven, Bergman, Blake, Borges, Bosch, Brueghel, Malfeasance of Bach, Malfeasance of Beasts
The Patricide
Augustine, AA Milne, Hardy, Diderot, Bosch, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Racine, Cervantes, Durer, Montaigne, Rimbaud
The Very Sexual
Auden, Sophocles, Hardy, Rimbaud, Sterne, Ovid, Joyce, Pushkin, Malfeasance of Epics, Aeschylus, Chuang Tzu, Euripides
The Sexual
Tolkien, Auden, Caravaggio, David, Cranmer, Goethe, Bosch, Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, Heraclitus, Racine, Tchaikovsky, AA Milne, Sappho, Donne, Hitchcock, Vitruvius, John, Paul, Dante, Cervantes, Plato, Job, Malfeasance of Children, Auden
The Road Less Travelled
Chekov, Milton, Rembrandt, Dostoevsky, Handel, Haussmann, Mozart, Shakespeare, Vico
