Four hours of painting with the Dumas audiobook, the market, café with the art dealer, English bookshop for Balzac, with whom I have enjoyed a raucous Friday night.
Beetled through the streets and saw other earnest young men, pleased with themselves and no doubt brimming with noble thoughts, pinned and noted as such, full of warm reflections of how good it is to be a fine fellow in such a splendid capital city, gleefully thinking forth what ripe material all of this will provide for a glorious chapter of their future biographies to captivate wide-eyed and adoring followers, soon to be found.
Saw the shambling beggar man on the bridge, identical to the limping, crooked old derelict in Florence, saw the homeless refugees, just like in Greece, saw the loud American tourists, the dressed-up look-at-me beaux, the eager students, all legible, replaceable, ignorable, neglible. But perhaps they are not stock-characters, archetypes, interchangeable blobs, but are truly other mes, other stories that find themselves to be centres of universes! Grotesque too-many-sided garnet of humanity!
"Oh, what is man!" d'Avrigny muttered. "The most egoistical of all animals, the most personal of all creatures, who cannot believe otherwise than that the earth revolves, the sun shines and death reaps for him alone—an ant, cursing God from the summit of a blade of grass"
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
