I thought about deleting yesterday's post about living into the future--
I don't much like it when I lean toward preachy [anytime I speak of "we"].
But I decided it's OK:
I sometimes wish my blog reflected more on these times I/we live in, and that was me trying to get some elevation above the scene,
a bird's eye view.
I don't do that very often: blogs--mine, anyway--are more like a daily reading of rainfall in one location.
Anyway, that post was also me starting to uncover something about the life of the Frenchman who started SVDP--Frederic Ozanam.
His life not only overlapped with Victor Hugo's and Daumier's, but with Flaubert's.
And Flaubert's The Sentimental Education is about a callous young man during the 1848 Revolution in Paris that overthrew the monarchy (temporarily)--the thirty-five year old Ozanam was there.
I know little about Ozanam, but what I've found is not a man with sticky-toffee-pudding piety but more of a social revolutionary.
He started the society when he was twenty and a fellow student challenged his faith by asking,
I want to read more about Ozanam and his times––and it happens that I'd put Sentimental Education on my recent "Reread List":
I'd read it when I was seventeen and remember nothing about it, except that I didn't like it.
What I remember most about Flaubert comes from Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1983):
a Flaubert scholar goes looking for the stuffed parrot that was the model for LouLou in A Simple Heart
("a story that makes a true virtue of love but refuses to derive any moral from it," says Judith Thurman.*)
The reveal made a huge impression on me.
What do you need for a bird's eye view?
Fifty parrots.
If I could design a cover for Flaubert's Parrot, it would have this watercolor sketch by Edward Lear (whose lived almost the exact years as Flaubert), from Lear's sketchbook. [via]
*Flaubert, from Judith Thurman's wonderful New Yorker review "An Unsimple Heart":
I don't much like it when I lean toward preachy [anytime I speak of "we"].
But I decided it's OK:
I sometimes wish my blog reflected more on these times I/we live in, and that was me trying to get some elevation above the scene,
a bird's eye view.
I don't do that very often: blogs--mine, anyway--are more like a daily reading of rainfall in one location.
Anyway, that post was also me starting to uncover something about the life of the Frenchman who started SVDP--Frederic Ozanam.
His life not only overlapped with Victor Hugo's and Daumier's, but with Flaubert's.
And Flaubert's The Sentimental Education is about a callous young man during the 1848 Revolution in Paris that overthrew the monarchy (temporarily)--the thirty-five year old Ozanam was there.
I know little about Ozanam, but what I've found is not a man with sticky-toffee-pudding piety but more of a social revolutionary.
He started the society when he was twenty and a fellow student challenged his faith by asking,
"What is your church doing now? What is she doing for the poor of Paris? Show us your works and we will believe you!"Well. OK, then.
I want to read more about Ozanam and his times––and it happens that I'd put Sentimental Education on my recent "Reread List":
I'd read it when I was seventeen and remember nothing about it, except that I didn't like it.
What I remember most about Flaubert comes from Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1983):
a Flaubert scholar goes looking for the stuffed parrot that was the model for LouLou in A Simple Heart
("a story that makes a true virtue of love but refuses to derive any moral from it," says Judith Thurman.*)
The reveal made a huge impression on me.
What do you need for a bird's eye view?
Fifty parrots.
If I could design a cover for Flaubert's Parrot, it would have this watercolor sketch by Edward Lear (whose lived almost the exact years as Flaubert), from Lear's sketchbook. [via]
_____________________________
*Flaubert, from Judith Thurman's wonderful New Yorker review "An Unsimple Heart":
“I feel we are entering into darkness,” Flaubert prophesied to Sand [in 1870?]. “Perhaps race wars are going to begin again?
Over the next hundred years we shall see several million men killing each other at a single sitting. All of the Orient against all of Europe, the old world against the new.”
Then he added, typically, “Why not?”
Hmmm...I haven't read "Flaubert's Parrot." Or your previous post, which I'm going to get to now!
ReplyDeleteOh, I highly recommend Flaubert's Parrot!
ReplyDelete--Frex = Fresca
I read Sentimental Education when I was 20 and the fact that it was set during the 1848 commune is news to me. I don't even remember that there was a war in it. So, there you go.
ReplyDeleteWhat I remember from that book is a beautiful line, that I ave had the pleasure to turn over in my mind many times in these past 43 years since I read it, how a young man, the hero, I presume, falls in love with an older married woman, and he longs to know her, how she lives and thinks. He longed "to know every dress she ever wore."
I thought that was a very spiffy line when I first read it, and I still do.
I did not know how to read irony until I was in my 30s.
VIVIAN: He longed "to know every dress she ever wore."
ReplyDeleteAaack! Flaubert's perfect phrases make me want to stab myself in the heart.
F, I so heart you. My preferred disinclinatory expression is "makes me want to put my fist through the wall", thought you would want to know.
DeleteHeart you too, SPARKER!
ReplyDeleteMembers of the "literature made me declaim violently" club?