So now [the days] were going to continue one after another like this, always the same, innumerable, bringing nothing! Other people’s lives, however dull they were, had at least possibility that something would happen. A chance occurrence would sometimes lead to an infinite number of sudden shifts, and the setting would change. But for her, nothing happened, God had willed it! The future was a dark corridor, with the door at its end firmly closed.
She gave up music. Why play? Who would hear her? Since she would never be able to play in a concert, in a short-sleeved velvet dress, on an Erard piano, striking the ivory keys with her light fingers and feeling a murmur of ecstasy circulate around her like a breeze, it was not worth the trouble of boring herself with studying. She left her drawing portfolios and her tapestry work in the cupboard. What was the use? What was the use? Sewing irritated her.
‘I’ve read everything,’ she would say to herself.
And she would hold the tongs in the fire till they turned red, or watch the rain fall.
How sad she was, on Sundays, when they rang vespers! She would listen, with dazed attention, as the cracked chimes of the bell sounded one by one. A cat on the rooftops, walking slowly, would arch its back to the pale rays of the sun. The wind, on the big road, would blow trails of dust. In the distance, now and then, a dog would howl; and the bell, at equal intervals, would continue its monotonous tolling, which vanished into the countryside.
”Madame Bovary, Flaubert, p. 54 of the beautiful Lydia Davis translation
Today is Flaubert’s birthday. I discovered this by chance after purchasing Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot at work, which inspired me to do some biographical digging on the great realist himself—this happens to me, I am psychic about dead authors and their significant days. “Je suis Madame Bovary!” indeed—this passage, an excerpt from the part of the book that I think of as Emma’s Ennui, exemplifies how deeply empathetic a character she is despite her shallowness. Who has not had winters exactly like this one, when all activities lose their attraction and each concrete detail of the world seems a brick in an immobilizing prison? Except Flaubert says it better than I.
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
I was going to post a Fitzgerald quote yesterday in honour of his birthday but somehow in the darkness between work and home and movie theater and home again I got lost in reading poetry instead. So, here, a day late: one of his many utterly perfect descriptions of a moment.
Possession: A Romance, A. S. Byatt
It is my birthday. I am 24 today. The air is full of cottonwood and I can hardly breath for it but I don’t mind—it’s beautiful, otherworldly, one of those heavy summer days that can tip towards onerous but today—since I am insisting it be charmed—is like a dream. & today I am giving myself the birthday gift of rereading Possession, which I have not touched since I first devoured it almost ten years ago. It is a glorious, grand book, one of my absolute favourites; rereading it now I see so clearly how it helped set me on my ridiculous pompous path of loving Literature (always capitalized) more than life (never so). A dangerous book for my then-so-young self, but so satisfying—a true romance.
“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”
-Joan Didion.I think Mordecai Richler is an excellent example of this quote.
motion blindness
“The visual disorder complained of by the patient was a loss of movement vision in all three dimensions. She had difficulty, for example, in pouring tea or coffee into a cup because the fluid appeared to be frozen, like a glacier. In addition, she could not stop pouring at the right time since she was unable to perceive the movement in the cup (or a pot) when the fluid rose. Furthermore, the patient complained of difficulties in following a dialogue because she could not see the movement of the face, and, especially, the mouth of the speaker. In a room where more than two other people were walking, she felt very insecure and unwell, and usually left the room immediately, because ‘people were suddenly here or there but I have not seen them moving.’ The patient experienced the same problem but to an even more marked extent in crowded streets or places, which she therefore avoided as much as possible. She could not cross the street because of her inability to judge the speed of a car, but she could identify the car itself without difficulty. ‘When I’m looking at the car first, it seems very far away. But then, when I want to cross the road, suddenly the car is very near.’ She gradually learned to ‘estimate’ the distance of moving vehicles by means of the sound becoming louder.”
—from a study by Zihl, Von Cramon, and Mai in 1983; quoted in a footnote of Oliver Sacks’ An Anthropologist on Mars
A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and the silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of ancient hills.
”Goethe
(via reckon) (via travellinglight)
(via benjaminhilts)
“And yet this vision of Lola lingered in his mind for many years, like a memory rising up from glacial seas, although in fact he hadn’t seen anything, which meant there was nothing to remember, only the shadow of his ex-wife projected on the neighboring buildings in the beam of the streetlights, and then the dream: Lola walking off down one of the highways out of Saint Cugat, walking along the side of the road, an almost deserted road since most cars took the new toll highway to save time, a woman bowed by the weight of her suitcase, fearless, walking fearlessly along the side of the road.
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The University of Santa Teresa was like a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain. It was also like an empty dance club.”
-2666, Roberto Bolano
