Day 0465

All this reading is going in one ear and out the other. Finished Germinal. Enjoyed the devouring pit, the filthy brutality of existence, the sex, the bourgeois brioche.

Painted, napped, gorged on goodies from the bakery. Consciously slipped in and out of my own stream of consciousness, which may or may not be something akin to meditation, or madness.

“Bread! bread! bread!”
Then he grew angry and shouted furiously in the tumult:
“Bread! is that enough, idiots!”
He could eat, and all the same he was groaning with torment. His desolate household, his whole wounded life, choked him at the throat like a death agony. Things were not all for the best because one had bread. Who was the fool who placed earthly happiness in the partition of wealth? These revolutionary dreamers might demolish society and rebuild another society; they would not add one joy to humanity, they would not take away one pain, by cutting bread-and-butter for everybody. They would even enlarge the unhappiness of the earth; they would one day make the very dogs howl with despair when they had taken them out of the tranquil satisfaction of instinct, to raise them to the unappeasable suffering of passion. No, the one good thing was not to exist, and if one existed, to be a tree, a stone, less still, a grain of sand, which cannot bleed beneath the heels of the passer-by. Émile Zola - Germinal