Podium, positivism, pages

Three times today Javier Marias has made me laugh out loud, but I'm not quite sure how to share that experience. I'm reading Dark Back of Time, which explores in some depth the bizarre public responses to his novel All Souls, which I enjoyed but found rather thin and lacking in intensity. Dark Back of Time is another thing altogether, although I'm not quite sure what. Still, I keep reading it for at least three reasons.

1. The Podium Effect:

...all the world's professors, male and female, enjoy what could be called "the podium effect," due to which even the ugliest and most squalid, horrible, tyrannical and despicable among them arouse spurious and delusional passions, as I know all too well. I've seen dazzling women barely out of their teens swooning and melting over some foul-smelling homunculus with a piece of chalk in his hand, and innocent boys degrading themselves (circumstantially) for a scrawny, furrowed bosom stooped over a desk.

2. You could look it up:

I saw myself freed from the specter of being accused of the wide variety of depravities I had been dreading for a week by then, balanism, strangury, satyriasis, nequicia, mictionism, pyromania, enfiteusis, positivism, erotesis, felo-de-se, or perhaps even lardy-dardiness, though I don't know if any of those words, which have cropped up here and there in my translations, correspond to vices (I think not) and I'm not about to go and look them all up right now, but their obscene or sinister sonority alone makes them all, without exception, deserve to be tremendous perversions--irreversible degenerations. It would have pained me to be accused of enfiteusis.

3. Reading instructions:

Those who have already read these pages in that novel [All Souls] can skip them--I believe--without feeling cheated (it's always a pleasure to skip a few pages and it's almost never possible), and those who have no prior acquaintance with them can read them now without having to spend a cent more to acquire them, though undoubtedly the reproduction will not be verbatim and may include a few marginal notes or scattered comments, so in the end I don't know if those who are already happily and frivolously preparing to skip them would be wise to do so. Of course they can also skip all the pages, all these pages, without very serious consequences.

To which I answer: No I can't. Can't skip one of 'em. Must keep reading, despite Marias's habit of simultaneously offering and withholding delectable treats, waving them in front of the reader's nose and then whisking them away with such style and panache that we barely notice that we have not partaken. Sly guy, that Marias. Quite lardy-dardy. Wouldn't surprise me at all if he'd committed enfiteusis.