Box Stories: Too Small to Lose

It seems boxes have a specific connection to smallness and shrinking. One of the more, if not most, surreal box stories can be found in the novel The third Policeman by Irish writer Flann O’Brien.

In the book retired policeman MacCruiskeen has an interest in making tiny projects and is keen to show them, including a miniature piano and a tiny speer. At one point: “He walked back to the dresser, opened the lower part of it, and took out a little chest till he put it on the table for my inspection. Never in my life did I inspect anything more ornamental and well-made. It was a brown chest like those owned by sea-faring men or lascars from Singapore, but it was diminutive in a very perfect way as if you were looking at a full-size one through the wrong end of a spy-glass. It was about a foot in height, perfect in its proportions and without fault in workmanship. There were indents and carving and fanciful excoriations and designs on every side of it and there was a bend on the lid that gave the article great distinction. At every corner there was a shiny brass corner-piece and on the lid there were brass corner-pieces beautifully wrought and curved impeccably against the wood. The whole thing had the dignity and the satisfying quality of true art.” Because of this awe inspiring beauty and perfection MacCruiskeen concluded that the only thing worthy of placing inside this box was another box of equal perfection, just smaller. Indeed, upon opening the small box an even smaller yet equally perfect box is revealed. Again the craftsman could only bare to fit another perfect but slightly smaller box inside of it, and so on. MacCruiskeen reveals ten further Matryoshka chests, each nested in the previous one. Eventually, with the assistance of a borrowed pin, he extracts even more chests until there are thirty-one of these Mandelbrotian creations, the last few of which are invisible! The policeman explains: “Nobody has ever seen the last five I made because no glass is strong enough to make them big enough to be regarded truly as the smallest things ever made. Nobody can see me making them because my little tools are invisible into the same bargain. The one I am making now is nearly as small as nothing.” Quite absurdly at some point someone unwittingly knocks the smallest chest out of MacCruiskeen’s hands, and MacCruiskeen demands they search the floor until they find it: “We crawled feebly about the floor, peering and feeling for something that could not be felt or seen and that was really too small to be lost.”