We have much to learn from idiots, the blood relatives of inanimate objects. When matter accords them a moment’s respite, they do not wantonly betray it. They do not abuse their meager possibilities, they remain prudently faithful to the matter they came from and to which they return. And with what simplicity they ignore words, the signs with which objects prostitute themselves. They experiment with blindness, deafness, paralysis, olfactory anesthesia, paradisiacal mental science, and if they are nevertheless obliged to see, hear, or smell, they refrain from organizing their impressions into disciplined companies, thus from the very start avoiding the temptations of self-delusion. With what a lordly gesture they renounce memory, sweeping away their impressions like bus tickets good for only one trip, so that the freshness of individual encounter is never tainted by grotesque attempts at recognition. As far as they are concerned, shoes and chamber pots are interchangeable; the idiot is a born democrat who does not deprive objects of the freedom that must some day be restored to them willy-nilly. If his defects, thanks to which pain merely hurts and does not persist in the form of fear, did not protect him, if memory and imagination acquainted him with the nightmares of the future, we should have nothing to learn from the idiot. As it is, God bless this being who guzzles, pisses, and fiddles with himself, this being pampered by the blissful present, who revels in his awareness of his organs; he is the hero of the here and now, foster brother of objects, our masters.

From George Konrad’s The Case Worker, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, 1974, p. 78.