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plead their privilege of lying as an old immemorial right) or by professors of medicine, writing ex cathedra, I have but one emphatic criticism to pronounce,—Lies! lies! lies!
    He did in fact destroy himself with opium, completely. He sank so far that his broad interests during a particularly critical period were reduced to the study of the national economy, a subject which at that time was thought to be reserved for “the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect.” Of course he could also have confined himself to a description of the drawbacks, the misery of addiction, for there he was the greatest expert of them all—in precisely the same way that we entomologists can expand endlessly on the unpleasant effects of environmental devastation on the tiniest of creatures.
    And nevertheless, the rapture of intoxication seeps in between the lines.

But, to quit this episode, and to return to my intercalary year of happiness. I have said already, that on a subject so important to us all as happiness, we should listen with pleasure to any man’s experience or experiments, even though he were but a ploughboy, who cannot be supposed to have ploughed very deep in such an intractable soil as that of human pains and pleasures, or to have conducted his researches upon any very enlightened principles.
    Now, with the best will in the world, I cannot pretend that I have ploughed very deeply into the soil of joy, and into that of misery hardly at all, but however it happened, I began to get a distinct feeling that René Malaise had.
    On a good day, his trap might give me a thousand insects.
    But that was only the beginning.

Chapter 5
The Archipelago of Buttonology
    It was August Strindberg who coined the term “buttonology.” He was angry and needed a taunt. The old taunts wouldn’t do, so he invented a new one—funnily enough in a short story called “The Isle of the Blessed.” He wrote it in Switzerland in 1884 and, as usual, what he wanted was more than simple revenge for various injustices.
But because the idle found it difficult to do nothing, they invented every sort of idiotic foolishness. One began to collect buttons; a second gathered spruce, pine and juniper cones; a third procured a grant for travelling the world.

    Several years later he lived and wrote one of his best novels right here on the island, on the east side, facing the open sea. Yet I’m fairly certain he was not happy here. Eager as he was to conquer territories on a European order of magnitude—or larger—he belonged by natural necessity to the mainland. Finding peace in a little cage was not for him, it made him aggressive and ornery. It was here too, on Midsummer Day 1891, that he attacked his wife’s Danish lover Marie David so violently that he was later hauled before the district court and found guilty of assault. “Terrier” is still related to “territory.”
    The target of his innovative taunt in “The Isle of the Blessed” is said to have been the archaeologist Oscar Montelius and his then famous typological method for establishing the chronology of Bronze Age artifacts, but this has not prevented generations of ignorant wiseacres from applying Strindberg’s characterization to other scientific systematizers, entomologists among them.
The man who collected buttons had accumulated a fearful quantity. As he did not know how he was going to preserve them, he sought and received money from the state to erect a building to house the collection. He then sat down to organize his buttons. There were many different ways of sorting them. One could divide them by garment—underwear buttons, trouser buttons, coat buttons, etc.—but our man devised a more artificial and therefore more difficult system. But to achieve this, he needed help. First he wrote a treatise on The Need for a Study of Buttons on Scientific Principles. Then he petitioned the Treasury for a Professorship in Buttonology, along with two assistants. His application was