emily’s Reviews > In One Brief Moment All Eternity > Status Update

‘A—poppy in a field of burdocks—thistles—he carries the love of antiquity in his entrails. He will never cease to be interested—Moonlight washes in—‘How to render in words those things for which there is no language, those impressions—mysteries of the soul unknown to the soul itself?’ He has no answer to any of these questions, but somehow feels important to ask them to honour their existence—Saint Anthony, Bruegel—’

‘There are rules—unwritten, unspoken, yet binding—A gossamer moment flutters by—hushed, like a moth wriggling free from its husk—Somewhere in that sprawling—the square where they burned Joan of Arc at the stake, the smell of scorched human skin—lingering—This, he believes, is how a storyteller sees the world. Gazing—through the eyes of a bird—& from below—like an earthworm—every possible angle,—a fixation—The truth—’

‘We carry our past within us—we all carried on in this manner—Seasons passed, harvests came & went—Hundred are dying each week—in every arrondissement—blue will always maintain a singular, haunting significance—foreshadowing disruption, disobedience—the azure excitement that encompasses Emma when she mistakenly believes that she has found love—the same hue will ruin her beautiful complexion after she swallows the—’

‘Words mean nothing? Then why—insist on going to church if they do not trust their prayers will reach—God? The boy knows—will not listen—Just because something sounds silly doesn’t mean it can do you no harm. It’s the fluff that kills you—float in the air—vert-de-gris—a hue of in-between-ness—You've got to make it seem as if they all went happily—creatures, just to have the privilege of being eaten by the Flauberts.’

‘I once asked him why he was so interested—his response: ‘But they are the ones interested in us—They are always around.’ Some women—because they have suffered themselves, they want every other woman to suffer even more—Mdm. Flaubert only has eyes for my errors—I’m not scared of the ghosts—it is the living that I find—uneasy. Then he said, ‘Your grandma’s—there she can see—She knows where I dropped the—butterfly.’

‘Layer upon layer of history—the living—& the ghosts—realms separate—inevitably bleed into each other. The delicate fragrance of gardenias—Sounds, too, find ways of crossing borders—witches, vampires, changelings—she impersonates them—in various dialects—connected, even for a fleeting moment, to another life—Luck is not we receive—but what we are spared—Our good fortune is—another name for someone else’s misfortune.’

‘—the Seine—artery named after—Sequana—dissolving its own memories, forever at war w/ itself. Beyond—the tulip tree rustles its leaves—whispering in a language he cannot comprehend but would one day like to learn—He accepted her for who she is, not for who he wants her to be. But now, he must be the one ending her—I, Emma Bovary, have been—I yearned for something more. I'm not trying to trivialise my transgressions—’