It seems that anywhere one looks these days, one is confronted by the faces of the growing crowd of geriatrics, and what stands out is their noses––bulbous, pock-marked proboscides––that tend to mar the visages of these ancients (whether they realize it or not).
It is a scene involving four such unhandsome snouts that confronted Y-H-B as he sat at his usual table for lunch today at a neighborhood French restaurant (Le Moulin à Café) on York Avenue in Manhattan. Four senior citizens with outsize schnozzes had just sat down (evidently, two pairs of husband and wife) and started chattering, when the word ‘nose’ from Goethe’s Faust (Pt. 1, opening scene, “Night”), uttered by the protagonist, came suddenly to mind:
Faust:
Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerei und Medizin,
Und leider auch Theologie
Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn.
Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;
Heiße Magister, heiße Doktor gar
Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr
Herauf, herab und quer und krumm
Meine Schüler an der Nase herum –
Und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können!
I’ve studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,—
And even, alas! Theology,—
From end to end, with labor keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before:
I’m Magister—yea, Doctor—hight,
And straight or cross-wise, wrong or right,
These ten years long, with many woes,
I’ve led my scholars by the nose,—
And see, that nothing can be known!
[translated by Bayard Taylor]
“Leading [somebody] by the nose” has a fixed meaning: to cause to obey submissively. Given the deflated look of the geriatrics in question, their unsightly noses only conjured up submissiveness and worse.
Cf. Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac:
VALVERT
Ah… your nose… hem!…
Your nose is… rather large!
CYRANO (gravely)
Rather.
VALVERT (simpering)
Oh well—
CYRANO (coolly)
Is that all?
VALVERT (turns away with a shrug)
Well, of course—
CYRANO
Ah, no, young sir!
You are too simple. Why, you might have said—
Oh, a great many things? Mon dieu, why waste
Your opportunity? For example, thus:—
AGGRESSIVE: I, sir, if that nose were mine,
I’d have it amputated—on the spot!
[Etc.]
Such are the literary loci that drifted into Y-H-B’s mind when confronted by the ubiquitous schnozzolas of today.
MICHAEL SHAPIRO
Hm. Does this post constitute a kind of “nose shaming”? In any event, I’m personally now looking into nose reduction surgery. 🙂
You be the judge!