Without Lifting A Finger

Valery refuses to believe in the Muse of the Romantics, makes fun of what is called "inspiration." He adopted with pleasure the words of Flaubert: "Inspiration? That consists of sitting down to the table at the same time every day."

Flipping between Gide's Immoralist (almost finished) and a book of his essays: Autumn Leaves . Excerpt from an essay entitled "My Mother":      "Is what you said to me as we left our cousin's true?" she began with a great effort. "You really think so? I was ... well, as good as the others?"      And as I began to exclaim, she continued mournfully:      "If your father had told me so even once ... I never dared ask him, and I needed so terribly to know, when we went out together, if he was ..."      She was silent for a moment. I looked at her trying to hold back the tears. She finished in a lower tone of voice, hardly audible:      "... if he was pleased with me."      I think that those were her exact words which suddenly let me understand how many worries, unasked questions and expectations could, under the appearance of happiness, still dwell in...



Got a little bored with contemporary Russian Lit (for the most part: not Nabokov) and took a little vacation in an earlier time: Andre Gide. Reread Isabelle and am now halfway through Strait is the Gate .

Mise en abyme ( French pronunciation: [miz‿ɑ̃n‿abim] ; also mise en abîme ) is a term originally from the French and means "placed into abyss ". The commonplace usage of this phrase is describing the visual experience of standing between two mirrors , seeing an infinite reproduction of one's image, but it has several other meanings in the realm of the creative arts and literary theory . In Western art history , " mise en abyme " is a formal technique in which an image contains a smaller copy of itself, the sequence appearing to recur infinitely. [From  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_abyme ] * Velasquez's "The Maids of Honor" (1656) [From Photobucket]