Anti-Climacus

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: Now that I have just a little bit of free time (and the promise of a little bit more after Thursday), I returned to the novel I abandoned halfway through at the end of last break: Flaubert's Sentimental Education. I will admit that I first purchased the book (end of sophomore year of college) because of that scene in Manhattan; my only other Flaubert experience (short stories aside) is The Temptation of St. Anthony. Interesting enough, but probably not worth reading. Sentimental Education would make an interesting companion to Rousseau's Confessions. I make no secret of my dislike for Rousseau; I think Flaubert is willing to be critical of Frédéric in a way Rousseau is not critical of himself, and the end result is to make Frédéric a more human figure. Because we're not admonished from the beginning to withhold judgment, it makes it easier to sympathize and forgive him his (fictional) shortcomings.

If 19th Century French novels are good for nothing else, it's nice, medium-length speeches about big concepts like Art or Politics, that satirize the giving of medium-length speeches on Art or Politics, while still holding to some variant of the views there expressed. Thus:

"'I don't want any of your hideous reality! What do you mean by reality, anyway? Some see black, some see blue, and the mob see wrong. There's nothing less natural than Michelangelo, and nothing more powerful. The cult of external truth reveals the vulgarity of our times; and if things go on this way, art is going to become a sort of bad joke inferior to religion in poetry and inferior to politics in interest. You'll never attain the purpose of art--yes, it's purpose!--which is to give an impersonal sense of exaltation, with petty works, however carefully they're produced. Look at Bassolier's pictures, for instance: they're pretty, charming, neat, and not at all heavy. You can put them in your pocket, or take them with you on your travels. Solicitors pay twenty thousand francs for them, and there isn't tuppence-worth of ideas in them; but without ideas, there is no grandeur, and without grandeur no beauty! Olympus is a mountain. The proudest of all monuments will always be the Pyramids. Exuberance is better than taste, the desert better than a pavement, and a savage is better than a barber!'"