““Has my profession disfigured my mind, the endless hours of constant attentiveness, my ear for hire and open to all comers, my face painted with the glare of projected fantasies? The French have a term for it: deformation professionelle, the idea that all forms of work twist the mind away from reality. Hence a backfiring car sends the soldier diving for cover in a shrub. Litigators dart and cower in forests of imagined liabilities. For the detective and inspector, every testimony or confession is a network of lies and concealments. How could my work not have deformed me, all those long hours spent squinting into the soul's lightless recesses? How could I not have become some moon-eyed, cave-adapted creature, for whom ordinary daylight is an unendurable affliction?””
![“But if it so happens ... a work ... under pain of otherwise becoming shameful or false, requires fantasy ... [and that] certain limbs or elements of a figure are altered by borrowing from other species, for example transforming into a dolphin the hinder end of a griffon or a stag ... these…” quote by Michaelangelo](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/f78/michaelangelo-106976_art_but-if-it-so-happens-a-work-under-pain-o_2711730.jpg)
