I feel the need of leaving the modern world: my pen has been dipped in it too long, and I am as weary of portraying it as I am disgusted by the sight of it.
J'éprouve le besoin de sortir du monde moderne, où ma plume s'est trop trempée et qui d'ailleurs me fatigue autant à reproduire qu'il me dégoûte à voir.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, September 13, 2014
The Modern World
Gustave Flaubert, letter to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie (March 18, 1857; tr. Francis Steegmuller):