By Lida Prypchan
They met at university. He was studying the Sociology of Shame and she the Anatomy of Morals. Laying aside both shame and morals, they united their anatomies to destroy sociology. His objective was to prove to humanity that sociology should be eliminated because nobody pays any attention to its conclusions, let alone does anything about them. She, on the other hand, wanted to show that anatomy was a much more interesting, pure and sincere science than morals with all its pretense of honor.
While he tested her on anatomy, she praised and encouraged him in his eagerness for sociological destruction. Such was this union that he ended up with a degree in Anatomy and she ended up as the maximum embodiment of social destruction. Her parents, full of shame, were slowly killing her with their constant harping. Her nerves were so much on edge they seemed to sprout from her skin so she couldn’t bear to be touched. She was taken to the doctor, who diagnosed a severe case of “acute guilt.” It was such a common illness that we can say we all suffer from it, some in a latent and unsuspected manner, others all the time. They say it begins at birth. Already then, we feel the weight of a crime not yet committed, which follows us relentlessly. The rest comes on by increment. Through thousands of different mechanisms we see ourselves becoming isolated because of guilt. It is a stigma that cannot be erased – incomprehensible and inevitable.
She never recovered from this ailment, because it has the peculiar and unpleasant characteristic of passing from the acute stage to the chronic, irrespective of social class or race.
From a social point of view, everything has a slogan and every slogan has a jingle. She was destined to die surrounded by wearisome and repetitious jingles, which she felt like needles, boring into her temples – and thus it was she died.
Having graduated in Anatomy he fell into the doldrums. He tried to dispel his ennui with pleasure, forgetting that pleasure fades when it occurred repeatedly.
He devoted himself to archeology and visited cemeteries in his spare time, unconsciously on the search for death. He hadn’t noticed that he and death had begun to approach one another from opposite directions and that sooner or later they would collide.
Since she had died, he defied death.
One day as he walked through the cemetery he came across her gravestone, which bore this inscription: “Here lies the student of the Anatomy of Morals, who fell in love and formed a union with a student of the Sociology of Shame, who drove her to her grave.” His heart was rent and the next day he was found dead at her side.
The tombstone read, “A grievous vagary of blind love.”
