by ANNA CIAUNICA
Contemplating the world requires a body, and a body requires an immune system: the rungs of life create the stuff of thought
One can easily imagine Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (1904) tortured by deep philosophical questions such as ‘Who am I? What is the meaning of all this, what is life? Why am I here, given that I haven’t signed a consent form to be alive here and now, so what’s this all about, really?’
I too was tortured by these deep questions as a young student in philosophy, and used to ponder them standing in front of a cast of Rodin’s statue in the grounds of the Hôtel Biron in Paris. I guess I was looking for something, the meaning of all this. Since then, and after drinking so much coffee that I could flood a city with it, I still haven’t got an answer. And yet, one day, something happened: a breakthrough, or perhaps an epiphany.
A couple of years ago, I went back to The Thinker as I had so many times when younger: he was still there, still thinking, holding his head as if all those deep, heavy thoughts had transformed his skull to stone.
While searching for the right angle to take a selfie, a miracle happened: I got hungry. Partly because of the heat, partly because I’d had just one black coffee in the morning, the head of Rodin’s Thinker started tilting and melting, and the massive weight of his body became visible to my mind. It was as if the statue was slowly liquefying and transforming into a vegetal living thing, something like a salad, or perhaps a cucumber? Something fresh anyway, something that I could have eaten on the spot. And then some questions popped into my head: did the Thinker like cucumber salad? Where did he grow up? Did he prefer summer or winter? White wine or red? Where was he from?
And in that moment I realised I had got it all wrong. I was so obsessed with his thinking brain that I had ignored his toes – not to mention the rest of him.
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