Supermarkets

You should think twice before you enter a supermarket. You never know what dangers might be lurking in the aisles. You could slip on some spilt jam and break your leg. You might knock over a small child with your trolley in a moment of inattention. If the sheer range of ice-cream flavours fills you with indecision, you are in danger of getting frostbite. You could get stuck in a queue at the checkout for so long that your family register you as a missing person. When you eventually arrive home you might realise that you have bought a lot of worthless trash that you could do without.

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Love

If you are in love, you should do everything possible to get out of it. Otherwise you will begin to act out of character, lose your integrity and be caught in the mousetrap of conflicting emotions. To avoid these deadly consequences, practise holding your breath until you can do it for two minutes. The effort and concentration required should gradually push back those waves of longing that batter the coastline of your common sense.

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Types of silence

There are seventy three types of silence; anything that may be added to this list is merely a variation on, or a sub category of, one or other item. Thus the silence of mellowing apples in bare kitchens belongs to the general category of ripening fruit; and the silence of the rhombus is very much akin to that of the trapezium. On the other hand, the silence of stone circles is not the same as that of graveyards: the former is ordered and harmonious, while the latter is chaotic and discordant. Nor can the noble silence of dust on ancient tomes be classified with the gaudy silence of pollen that has fallen on a table from a vase of flowers. The science of silence is still developing, and the nature of silence itself is constantly changing. Some types of silence, indeed, are in danger of extinction. At some stage in the future a complete overhaul of the categories may well be necessary.

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Negative creation

Everything that happens in the world happens for negative reasons. Winds blow because of a lack of pressure in neighbouring air-masses. Light shines because of the inability of darkness to resist it. The origin of speech lies in the demise of dumbness, the shattering of primordial silence. Power can only result from the destruction of rivals, satiety from the annihilation of meat and vegetables, happiness from a surfeit of unawareness. Nothing comes into the world without a corresponding void that it can occupy.

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The nature of sleep

Since sleep can descend on us, it must be heavier than air. It is brittle in texture, being often broken. Its taste, when it has one, is invariably sweet, but by all accounts it is colourless and odourless. It is probably gaseous, since it never splashes when we fall into it, and it appears to have volition, being able to creep up on us and catch us unawares. It is not known by which orifices it enters the body. Certainly not the eyes, which are always shut when sleep arrives.

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Harmony and numbers

To achieve harmony in everyday life you should perform each act according to its numerical essence. The number pertaining to alarm-clocks, for example, is five: never allow them to ring more times than this, and never less, whereas a cup of coffee should be stirred sixteen times with a slight pause in the middle. Shoelaces will cause trouble unless they are done up three times and a door's lock needs seven checkings before it can be fully trusted. Never abandon a book on a page-number divisible by eleven. The number of mouthfuls taken to consume a meal should be a power of two. Never have an odd number of cows on your left.

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Calmness

The best way to keep calm is to smile. The greater the anxiety, the bigger the smile needs to be. The calmness-smile is not a smile for others to see, but rather a smile-in-itself. It is not in the least akin to a smile of satisfaction, a sardonic smile, an amused smile, a mocking smile, a smile of delight or a smile of catharsis. Each of these smiles has a given shape and extent, whereas the calmness smile is infinitely elastic.

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Tables and cups

When a table has four legs it is just called a table. But when a table has three legs it is invariably called a three-legged table, as if it were not a proper table. A cup with one handle is called a cup, but a cup with two handles is called a two-handled cup. If lacking a leg makes a table less of a table, then surely having an extra handle should make a cup more of a cup.

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The bluebottle

The bluebottle isn’t trying to annoy you. Your annoyance stems from your prejudices against buzzing insects, unthinkingly instilled in you by your ignorant parents. You should be swatting them, not the innocent bluebottle. Swat them gently, though, for they cannot help their ignorance, just as the bluebottle cannot help its blueness and its buzzing.

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