Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[welkins2139]

The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.

Would you explain the bold text?

Thank you

[CP]

Another puzzlement due to pulling out a small part of a passage and asking what it means. Here is the whole paragraph, from Chapter 1 of the Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde:

"Too much of yourself in it ! Upon my word, Basil, I didn't know you were so vain ; and I really can't see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you--well, of course you have an intellectual expression, and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of that. He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don't flatter yourself, Basil : you are not in the least like him."

The man is just blabbering on about how beauty is destroyed by intellectual exercise, and telling Basil that he is in an intellectual, and not very good looking. He has a point. Look at the vacuous but good-looking people in movies and videos, many of whom cannot speak a whole sentence that isn't written down for them in advance. (I didn't say Brad Pitt or Demi Moore or Harrison Ford, did I?)
_________________
You live a new life for every new language you speak. -Czech proverb