74

All the causes could not be fathomed, because causes overflow and hang above our heads their hunched thousand iron fists whose weight mingles and is weighted together with the days, with the sorrow, the blows received, with the harm one had done, and with the vagabondage of the nights. And night comes when it is all over when so many jaws have closed upon us that we no longer have the strength to stand, and our meat hangs upon our bodies, as though it had been masticated by every mouth. A night comes when man weeps and woman is emptied

p85-86

The unending vehicles, the blatant lights, the crowds in the streets, the lust and din create a frightening, Babel-like confusion and sets too many ideas whirling simultaneously. p4

Bubu of Montparnasse by Charles-Louis Phillippe Roy publishers New York

6.25.76

75

Even in the most intimate confidence there is always something that remains unsaid -

Flaubert

What I should like to write is a book about nothing at all, a book which would exist by virtue of the more internal strength of its style, as the earth holds itself unsupported in the air - a book which would have almost no subject, or in which at the least, the subject would be almost imperceptible, if such a thing is possible. The finest books are those which have the least subject matter; the more closely the expression approximates the thought, the more beautiful the book is. I believe the future of art lies in this direction.

It is for this reason that there are no such things as either beautiful or ugly subjects, and that it would almost be possible to establish as an axiom - speaking from the point of view of pure art - that there are no such things as subjects at all, style being in itself an absolute way of seeing things.

Letter by Flaubert quoted in Flaubert and Madame Bovary

247 - Trans Steenmalles[?]

6.27.76