The world is divided into those who can shit and those who cannot

The expression “The world is divided into those who can shit and those who cannot” begins as a blunt, bodily aphorism and becomes, in Florentino Ariza’s hands, a theory of sexual conduct. Its transformation links physical experience to character, but the passage complicates the neat division: what marks the sexually experienced is not simply frequency, but discretion, concealment, and the ability to let others misread them.

Origin and Recasting

Florentino recalls the phrase from childhood, when his godfather, the family doctor, used it to explain his chronic constipation. The doctor treated the distinction as the foundation of a whole theory of character, one he considered more reliable than astrology. A private bodily difficulty thus supplies the memorable language for a sweeping judgment about human nature.

Years later, Florentino reformulates the maxim: the world is divided into those who have sex and those who do not. The parallel preserves the original’s stark either-or structure while shifting its subject from bodily function to erotic experience. The joke is characteristic of Florentino’s way of turning an inherited saying into a private system for interpreting people.

Sexual Experience and Secrecy

In Florentino’s account, the sexually inexperienced are prone to make too much of love when they stray from convention, boasting as if they had invented it. Those with frequent experience, by contrast, live for sex but keep their exploits to themselves. Their silence is not evidence of indifference: they understand that their lives depend on discretion.

The passage makes concealment the maxim’s deeper test. Experienced lovers feign indifference so convincingly that others may call them impotent, frigid, or timid. They accept the mistaken impression because it protects them. Florentino’s revised division therefore distinguishes not only experience from inexperience, but public display from private knowledge.

The Secret Society

Florentino imagines discreet lovers as members of a society whose members recognize one another without a shared language. The idea turns secrecy into a form of mutual recognition: outsiders see a pose, while insiders understand what that pose conceals. When a young woman answers him in a way that signals such knowledge, he assumes she recognizes him as one of her own kind—and that each knows the other has understood.

That confidence proves dangerously misplaced. The woman is seeking work, not love, much less paid love. Florentino recognizes the error as the great mistake of his life, one that his conscience will recall continually. He responds by taking her to the head of personnel at the River Company of the Caribbean, where she receives the lowest-level job in the General Section. She performs it seriously, modestly, and devotedly for three years. The consequences give the aphorism an ironic edge: a theory built around reading hidden sexual meanings leads Florentino to misread a practical request, and discretion cannot protect him from his own assumption.

Meaning and Irony

The expression compresses Florentino’s sexual worldview into a memorable binary, but the episode also exposes the limits of that worldview. His imagined fraternity depends on correctly interpreting silence and apparent indifference; when he mistakes a request for employment as a coded sexual advance, the interpretive system fails. The maxim’s comic bluntness thus carries a narrative consequence: it reveals both Florentino’s confidence in reading others and the shame that follows when he reads them wrongly.