“… all names of whose etymologies he was ignorant, and that were to him as so many doors to sanctuaries filled with magnificent darkness”
- What is radically new has a clear flavor of openness for me. An invitation, a potential trip towards wider horizons. But the opposite is presented here; a tone of closeness, darkness between you and the unknown. May this subtlety in how to face the new be the only difference between men.
“She must have her chocolate every morning, attentions without end”
How simple! The first part of the sentence gives you a clear flavor, color, an object to put in mind, while the trailing segment highlights and clarifies the message. This manner of prioritizing the symbol is at the core of what I now understand as literature, as it is through it that one can fill a text with nuances, subjectivity, freedom, at last. In this case, for me, chocolate brings a notion of infantilism, weakness and dependance.
- This is not so much me understanding what Flaubert meant, but Flaubert leveraging on my real understanding, my real-life built connotation on chocolate, to bring depth and realness to the text. The text is now mine, which of course makes it shine brighter.
“[…] On it were four sirloins, six chicken fricassees, stewed veal, three legs of mutton, and in the middle a fine roast suckling pig, flanked by four chitterlings with sorrel. At the corners were decanters of brandy. Sweet bottled-cider frothed round the corks, and all the glasses had been filled to the brim with wine beforehand […]”
- Without knowing about the preparation methods, these feasts sound similar enough to what we would perform today
“Well, quite softly, one day following another, a spring on a winter, and an autumn after a summer, this wore away, piece by piece, crumb by crumb; it passed away, it is gone, I should say it has sunk; for something always remains at the bottom, as one would say — a weight here, at one’s heart”
- Closeness, the absence of it, as a cumulative core experience. We are the space between answers, the dullness filling in the gaps between our expectations and our reality.
“The memory of this ball, then, became an occupation for Emma”
Honoré de Balzac
“Paris, more vague than the ocean, glimmered before Emma’s eyes in an atmosphere of vermilion”
- Using opposite colors like this, in a western piece!
“She wanted at the same time to die and to live in Paris”
One has been seen making it back to Paris after being in Constantinopla, somebody tells Emma, as if he was talking of miracles. As small I feel my world, of translucent and vague ideas, even if it comfortably spreads from Tokyo to Caracas. It is a matter of illusion, of fake grandness that we involuntarily taint the unknown with.
I am struggling to keep myself present in most scenes. I am also often unsure about who is there with me. Could be the language, could be related to literary execution. What I enjoy of the book gets buried by this.
“The flames, however, subsided, either because the suply had exhausted itself, or because it had been piled up too much. Love, little by little, was quelled by absence; regret stifled beneath habit; and this incendiary light that had empurpled her pale sky was overspread and faded by degrees”
Chapter 8, Part II. Enigmatic. I find a continuum of loose connections between the mayor’s discourse and Rodolphe’s passions and tricks; between love and politics. The arrival of love, the arrival of a change. Very powerful piece.
- Woke up today to Milei being the new president of Argentina. A victory that was engineered from this same love-politics correlation. May approximating these complex human patterns in literature be later useful for political strategy.
“She repeated ‘I have a lover! a lover!’ delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her”
- This early ecstasy that comes with new romances, and all the light it brings! It is for me the sweetest and most relevant object to win with open relationships
Emma’s point of view has not been used narratively at all since Rodolphe appeared. It would be the main prism from where to look into the relationship, in actually modern literature.
“[…] he even talked slang to dazzle the bourgeois, saying bender, crummy, dandy, macaroni, the cheese, cut my stick and ‘I’ll hook it’, for ‘I am going’”
Leon appears surprisingly, in the theatre, just before part two finishes. I could read some architectural metagame between the lines - although it probably is but a cheap twist.
“From that moment her existence was but one long tissue of lies, in which she enveloped her love as in veils to hide it. It was a want, a mania, a pleasure carried to such an extent that if she said she had the day before walked on the right side of a road, one might know she had taken the left”
- How disrupting for one’s narratives is the double life.
“We must not touch our idols; the gilt sticks to our fingers”
“He replied philosophically: ‘Such is life!’”
- One word away from being the main highlight - such is life sometimes.
What a great death scene! The most serious prose is the one that thrills you as this did to me.
How volatile and futile in the long run, all that burning love, that left nothing but traumas and texts that now read ridiculous.