Once when I asked him why he had never ventured on a Treatise he answered, with his characteristic smile and chuckle, that large-sclae enterprise, such as Treatises and marriage, had never appealed to him. It may be that the deemed them industries subject to diminishing return, or that they lay outside his powers or the limits he set to his local universe.

Pérdida de tiempo. Para las mujeres, la duración de un amor que no concluye en matrimonio. “Con Prudencio, perdí siete años.”

Parecen ignorarse, uno al otro, pero sin furia ni irritación: más bien como si la larga convivencia los hubiera ido cerrando tanto a cada uno en sí mismo que ponen al otro en completo olvido y si casi siempre dicen los dos lo mismo no es porque se influyan mutuamente sino porque reflexionan los dos por separado a partir del mismo estímulo y llegan a la misma conclusión.

[W]e didn’t marry, or get engaged, or even commit long-term. When you’re committed to the present, that can be hard to do.

Ein verheirateter Philosoph gehört in die Komödie.

In 1878 [George Arnold, M. C. Escher’s father,] left Japan. He did not find it difficult to get work back in Holland. After some fruitful visits to colleagues at the Ministry of Transport, he applied for the post of District Engineer in Maastrich. After his stay in Japan, and as the result of an inheritance, his financial position had improved. So he started to look for a wife.

‘However, Catholic Maastrich was not suitable in this respect,’ he writes in his autobiography. ‘I did know some gifted and attractive women and girls in the Protestant circle but these by no means fitted the equation w = 1/2m + 10, in which ‘w’ is the right age for a girl and ’m’ represents the man’s age.