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some clever by-play...

The impressions the [Delaroche] attempted to produce are, for the most part, independent from the way the picture is painted. It is enough if the composition can trigger our imagination. It is even preferable that the eye not be detained too much in the contemplation of the canvas: this would weaken the emotional effect."

Profiles - Knud Jensen by Laurence Weschler

New Yorker - August 30, 1982

"Flaubert once wrote that it takes three particular details, when describing any fresh new scene, to establish its substantial reality in the reader's mind, to give it a sense of lived-in three-dimensionality."

Gide: Influence creates nothing: it awakens. The power of an influence comes from the fact that it has only revealed to me some

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part of myself that was still unknown to me.

Aug 27.82

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death, is referable to this. ...In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I to them?

quoted in 'Gissing in Context' - Poole p. 35-36