From Flaubert's Letters

To Louise Colet:

     What would I learn from those wonderful newspapers you so want me to take each morning, with my bread and butter and cup of coffee? Why should I care what they say? I have very little curiosity about the news, politics bores me to death, and the literary articles stink. To me it's all stupid-making and irritating . . . Yes, newspapers disgust me profoundly -- I mean the ephemeral, things of the moment, what is important today and won't be tomorrow. This is not insensitivity. It is simply that I sympathize as much, perhaps even more, with the past misfortunes of those who are dead and no longer thought of -- all the cries they uttered, now unheard. I feel no more pity for the lot of the modern working classes than for that of the ancient slaves who turned the millstones. I am no more modern than I am ancient, no more French than Chinese; and the idea of la patrie, the fatherland -- that is, the obligation to live on a bit of earth colored red or blue on a map, and to detest the other bits colored green or black -- has always seemed to me narrow, restricted, and ferociously stupid. I am the brother in God of everything that lives, from the giraffe and the crocodile to man, and the fellow-citizens of everyone inhabiting the great furnished mansion called the universe . . . Poetry is a free plant. It grows where no one has ever seeded it. The poet is simply the patient botanist who scales mountains to gather it.