"Arithmetic! Algebra! Geometry! Grandiose trinity! Luminous triangle! Whoever has not known you is without sense!"
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Arithmetic, algebra, geometry: three schoolroom nouns made to sound like a religion, shouted with the fervor of a convert. Lautreamont doesn’t praise math in the calm, Enlightenment way; he stages an ecstatic hymn to it, baptizing the “trinity” and “triangle” in capital letters and exclamation points. The point isn’t that numbers are useful. It’s that they’re intoxicating - and maybe a little dangerous.
Lautreamont wrote in the late 1860s, when France was steeped in the prestige of science, engineering, and positivist confidence that knowledge could be systematized. Calling math a “grandiose trinity” flatters that mood while also warping it. He borrows Christian architecture (trinity, luminous revelation) and swaps in abstract disciplines, suggesting that modernity has quietly replaced God with method. The “luminous triangle” is a sly image: geometry as halo, but also geometry as sharp edge, a symbol of clarity that cuts.
The insult lands hardest at the end: “Whoever has not known you is without sense!” It’s not an argument; it’s a verdict. Lautreamont turns rationality into a gatekeeping identity - the faithful versus the senseless. Under the bravado, you can hear the anxiety of a poet living in an age that increasingly worships proof. He’s both courting that authority and parodying its certainty, exposing how easily “reason” becomes a new kind of dogma, complete with saints, heretics, and blinding light.
Lautreamont wrote in the late 1860s, when France was steeped in the prestige of science, engineering, and positivist confidence that knowledge could be systematized. Calling math a “grandiose trinity” flatters that mood while also warping it. He borrows Christian architecture (trinity, luminous revelation) and swaps in abstract disciplines, suggesting that modernity has quietly replaced God with method. The “luminous triangle” is a sly image: geometry as halo, but also geometry as sharp edge, a symbol of clarity that cuts.
The insult lands hardest at the end: “Whoever has not known you is without sense!” It’s not an argument; it’s a verdict. Lautreamont turns rationality into a gatekeeping identity - the faithful versus the senseless. Under the bravado, you can hear the anxiety of a poet living in an age that increasingly worships proof. He’s both courting that authority and parodying its certainty, exposing how easily “reason” becomes a new kind of dogma, complete with saints, heretics, and blinding light.
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| Topic | Knowledge |
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