No Longer Human ( PDFDrive )

127
sacks of rice are wasted in one day; if ten million
people each economize one paper handkerchief a
day, how much pulp will be saved?) that whenever
I left over a single grain of rice, whenever I blew my
nose, I imagined that I was wasting mountains of
rice, tons of paper, and I fell prey to a mood dark as if
I had committed some terrible crime. But these were
the lies of science, the lies of statistics and mathematics:
you can't collect three grains of rice from
everybody. Even as an exercise in multiplication or
division, it ranks as one of the most elementary and
feeble-minded problems, about on a par with the
computation of the percentage of times that people
slip in dark, unlighted bathrooms and fall into the
toilet, or the percentage of passengers who get their
feet caught in the space between the door of a subway
train and the edge of the platform, or other such
footling exercises in probability. These events seem
entirely within the bounds of possibility, but I have
never heard a single instance of anyone hurting himself
by falling into the toilet. I felt pity and contempt
for the self which until yesterday had accepted such
hypothetical situations as eminently factual scientific
truths and was terrified by them. This shows the
degree to which I had bit by bit arrived at a knowledge
of the real nature of what is called the world.
Having said that, I must now admit that I was