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.
“Sisters of Mercy,” Leonard Cohen
I like to pretend that I am the “you,” that Leonard is singing directly to me. As long as I believe that, this song is about the most comforting thing in the world to me these days.
One of the few pictures I saved from my winter computor crash, but thus without the photographer’s name. Fairly sure I got it from orchidthief@lj.
A favourite, & encapsulates my day very nicely.
W. Somerset Maugham (via whokilled)
I adore this quote & loved in general Of Human Bondage. It was a book full of painful shocks of recognition which were usually paired with dismay at my own youthful maudlin self — the same feeling I get whenever I read this passage or others from the book.
Gustave Flaubert
I decline to agree at this moment, but it’s still a very fine quote.
for reasons mainly sonic
“During the eight years Pnin had taught at Waindell College he had changed his lodgings — for one reason or another, mainly sonic — about every semester. The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglenooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody.”
—Pnin, V. Nabokov
Schherezade / Richard Siken
Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.
