THIS SCULPTURE BY RODIN always struck me as a kind of peculiar use of stone. The guy looks like he’s sitting on the toilet, contemplating his constipation. Maybe my disdain for the piece is because, due to my ostomy, I haven’t myself struck that pose since the surgery, but I don’t think so. As a depiction of someone thinking, it fails to take reality into account. We are thinking all the time during our waking hours. It is the focal point of our lives. “Life,” wrote Emerson in his Journal, “consists of what a man is thinking of all day.” We could probably just simplify that to ‘life is thinking.’ Thinking is consciousness and, without that, we’re dead. And it is not something that only occurs when one is sitting, like Rodin’s model or otherwise. We’re thinking on the move all the time. So, yes, I think Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ is silly, something not to marvel at but to make fun of. But, of course, great art doesn’t have to be realistic in order to achieve prominence. The Venus de Milo, once dug up and displayed, ended up in the Louvre, and it’s missing not only its arms but the left foot and the earlobes. If she’s constipated, like Rodin’s thinker, she seems to be dealing with it more comfortably. Besides, how’ll she wipe herself without arms?
