Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/138

 once-sleepy church pew.” Behind each one there is a comparison with a bed; in both cases there is besides the comparison also the technical factor of allusion. Once it is an allusion to the soporific effect of sermons, and the second time to the inexhaustible theme of sex.

Having found hitherto that a comparison as often as it appears witty owes this impression to its connection with one of the techniques of wit known to us, there are nevertheless some other examples which seem to point to the fact that a comparison as such can also be witty.

This is Lichtenberg’s characteristic remark about certain odes. “They are in poetry what Jacob Böhm’s immortal writings are in prose—they are a kind of picnic in which the author supplies the words, and the readers the meaning.”

“When he philosophizes, he generally sheds an agreeable moonlight over his topics, which is in the main quite pleasant, but which does not show any one subject clearly.”

Again, Heine’s description: “Her face resembled a kodex palimpsestus, where under the new block-lettered text of a church father peek forth the half-obliterated verses of an ancient Hellenic erotic poet.”

Or, the continued comparison of a very degrading tendency, in the “Bäder von Lucca.”