Ever Decreasing Circles Quotes

Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.

Then he demanded to see the royal storerooms and the lettuce garden. When he came back he looked very grave and said, “Great King, I know very well what sorry news it will be to you, but the cause of your sickness is those very lettuces by which you set such store.” “The lettuces?” cried King Darin. “Impossible! They are all grown from good, healthy seed and guarded day and night.” “Alas!” said El-arairah, “I know it well! But they have been infected by the dreaded Lousepedoodle, that flies in ever decreasing circles through the Gunpat of the Cludge—a deadly virus—dear me, yes!—isolated by the purple Avvago and maturing in the gray-green forests of the Okey Pokey. This, you understand, is to put the matter for you in simple terms, insofar as I can. Medically speaking there are certain complexities with which I will not weary you.

It was if I had been shut away inside myself, alone with frustration, a dark and monstrous demon, which at some point had grown enormous, and as if there was no way out. Ever-decreasing circles. Greater and greater darkness. Not the existential kind of darkness that was all about life and death, overarching happiness or overarching grief, but the smaller kind, the shadow on the soul, the ordinary man’s private little hell, so inconsequential as to barely deserve mention, while at the same time engulfing everything.

These fundamental imbalances led them into concentric circles of ever decreasing size: a nautilus shell of their discontent.