Monsieur Ouine , one of the greatest French novels of the 20th century, provides many answers to the modern world as it goes. The few quotes that follow give a glimpse of the Evil insinuated everywhere.
Month: April 2010
The virtues of boredom
In an acidic little book ( De la France , translated by Alain Paruit. L'Herne), Emil Cioran, gave an answer to the French malaise. He explained how attached he was to boredom, but he distinguished two kinds of boredom: that which opens "its doors to infinity", "as an extension in the spiritual of an immanent emptiness of being" and that which he thinks as one of the most important evils of France, its boredom “devoid of infinity”. He calls it "the boredom of clarity." […] the fatigue of things understood”.
Notes on The Child of Voluptuousness
Notes on L'Enfant de Volupté by Gabriele D'Annunzio.
P 58. Between the obelisk of the Trinity and the column of the Conception, I suspended in ex-voto my catholic and pagan heart.
She laughs at his sentence. He had a madrigal on his lips about his suspended heart; but he did not utter it, for he disliked prolonging the dialogue in this false and light tone and thus spoiling his intimate enjoyment. He was silent.
Notes on History of Catholicism
Notes from Histoire du catholicisme by Jean-Pierre Moisset (chapter 9: The shock of modernity (mid-18th century — 1870).p 394. The ritual of touching the scrofula at the end of the coronation, still practiced, is losing its credibility. Symptomatically, the formula for imposition, the formula for laying on of hands is changing. She was “the king touches you, God heals you”; it becomes “the king touches you, God heals you”. Another sign of the distancing of old certainties and the emergence of a new relationship with authority is found in the spread of contraceptive practices from the middle of the 18th century, still in France.