Perfected Common Sense

I have taken this reading from the pages of Jose Saramago's latest novels, "The Double". The story features a man, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso who pursues his double Antonio Claro (a.k.a. Daniel Santa Clara / actor) . Tertuliano is a history teacher, working on a project of how to study history from back to front as opposed to conventional methods of why history is taught traditional beginning to end. In Tertuliano's life: he is pursuing his double during the same time. Antonio Claro, is a man that inspires Tertuliano to research movies. This plotted through the narration of these events in metaphor, describe exactly what Tertuliano has been struggling with history. Tertuliano believes that history is a skewed model of the reality we have been caused to live with, regardless of our misconceptions of not questioning why things are the way they are. Part of Tertuliano's search for truth, involves writing Antonio Claro for contact information so that they can speak to each other face to face. The fact Tertuliano embarks on a conscious expidition, somehow relates with a kind of espionage, and ultimately crossing the border between myth and reality. It is a kind of fantasy with a phantom that plays out in Tertuliano's mind? The answer is in Tertuliano's examined approach of his double, that revealed the identity through a historical investigation using the imagination to perform it. An example of Tertuliano's techniques, is when he sits outside from the location where Antonio Claro lives. Sitting outside of the building reflects Tertuliano's inner-conflict, and the building represents Tertuliano's external self.

If asked which of the two, in his opinion, at the point we have now reached, was in charge of the game, he would feel inclined to reply, I am, although he was equally sure that the other man would think he had reason enough to give exactly the same answer if asked the same question. It did not worry him that the phone chosen for the meeting was so far from the city, it did not trouble him that Antonio Claro was intending to go armed, even though he was convinced that, contrary to his assurances, the pistol, because it would in all probability be a pistol, would be loaded. In a way that he himself realized to be totally lacking in logic, rationality, and common sense, he believed that the false beard he would wear would protect him while he was wearing it, basing this absurd belief on the firm idea that he would not take it off when they first met, only later on, when the absolute identity of hands, eyes, eyebrows, forehead, ears, nose, hair, had been agreed to the satisfaction of both.

What I bolded above^ illustrated the important feature of disguising himself, that Tertuliano plays a role in logic, rationality and common sense as the attributes associated with the mask he created.