Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Literary Inspiration

Yikes. I fear that I've been on the Negativity Train too long! I'm actually doing pretty well, emotionally. I didn't even cry when I started my cycle on day 33 this week. (Damn you, false hope.) Anyway, on to something different:

For the past month or so, I've been haunted by the ghost of a quotation that I remember writing down long ago. It had something to do with believing in the unbelievable...but I coudln't remember what book it was from or where I had written it down. Usually I write things in my little black Molskine notebook that I love to death and carry everywhere. But it wasn't there. While I was searching for something totally unrelated this weekend, I found another small notebook that I haven't looked at for years. In it was written this quotation from 'Madame Bovary':

"Romances are rarely shaped in such perfect good faith, and (her) excuse was in the radical purity of her imagination. She was profoundly incorruptible, and she cherished this pernicious conceit as if it had been a dogma revealed by a white-winged angel. Even after experience had given her a hundred rude hints, she found it easier to belive in fables, when they had a certain nobleness of meaning, than in the well-attested but sordid facts."

I've always loved the romance of life. The poetry of chance, the beauty of serindipity...I love it all. So in the grand scheme of life, I'm going to consider this journey a struggle that only Henry James could imagine. But in my story, there's going to be a happy ending.

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