Weininger, contemplating all that is before him, shrinks back without coming to a conclusion. Yes because he does not accurately report how much in the field he has observed, absorbed, walked through, touched, turned over, his “analytical odyssey” turns out to be slick and superficial, though sometimes with an undeniable mastery and even majesty, as in the moment early on when he describes how the shape of Harris’s cramped bedroom/office “harmonizes precisely” with the shape of Harris’s clenched first, down to the protrusion that is one case a bay window and in the other a thumb, and this is enough to recommend the entire monograph, notwithstanding the fact that it is written on rags, with crayon, and stuffed into a hole in the cell where Weininger now molders, serving out concurrent sentences for embezzlement, assault, and public indecency, dreaming his way backward through time to when he could open the door to the house he once owned and see Maria sitting on the big red chair, reading a book about pleasure, ignoring him to maximize it.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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