The Cave by José Saramago

With remarkable and reassuring unanimity, the dictionaries all define ridiculous as meaning anything deserving of mockery or laughter, anything that merits scorn, seems ludicrous or lends itself to comedy. For dictionaries, the particular circumstance does not appear to exist, although when they have to explain what it is, they describe it simply as a state or quality that accompanies a fact, which, in parenthesis, clearly warns us not to separate the facts from their circumstances and not to judge the former without first considering the latter. Yet could there be anything more profoundly ridiculous than Cipriano Algor wearing himself out trudging down the slope into the hollow, carrying the unwanted crockery in his arms, instead of hurling it willy-nilly down from above, transforming it instantly into mere crocks as he scornfully referred to it when describing to his daughter the various stages of the whole traumatic journey. The ridiculous, however, knows no limits.

If one day, as Marta imagined, a boy from the village were to retrieve a cracked plate from the rubble and take it home with him, we can be sure that the unfortunate defect had either occurred in the warehouse itself or been caused, given the inevitable clashing of pots and plates, by the uneven road surface during the trip from the Center to the hollow. We have only to observe the care with which Cipriano Algor goes down the slope, the trouble he takes in placing the various bits of pottery on the ground, in keeping like with like, fitting one inside the other when he can and when it seems advisable, it is enough to see this laughable scene with our own eyes for us to state categori cally that not a single plate was broken, that not a single cup lost its handle and not a single teapot was deprived of its spout.