Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education”, II

And he went into a private room by himself. Through the two open windows he could see people in the windows of the houses opposite. Broad puddles quivered like watered silk on the drying asphalt, and a magnolia at the edge of the balcony filled the room with its perfume. This scent and the cool of the evening soothed his nerves; and he sank onto the red divan under the mirror….. (Sentimental Education)

I feel guilty, because Flaubert probably spent hours writing that paragraph, but when I came to  it  I just skimmed past, because who cares? Likewise, when the woman Frederic has pursued for years takes him on a guided tour of her husband’s ceramics factory in order to keep him from declaring his love, that’s hilarious, but did Flaubert really have to spend two days reading up on ceramics just so he could have Mme. Arnoux use the terms “drabblers” and “roughing shop” correctly? There’s tons of that stuff, and Flaubert worked so hard on it, but I just don’t care.

Is not Mme. Arnoux, heaping up facts into a barrier making communication impossible, the very image of the realistic novelist? Or is it Frederic, the obsessive lover, who is reminded of his supposed beloved  by every tiny detail of pretty much anything? (Here we are, back with Petrarch again).

Nonetheless, with Sentimental Education Flaubert, after several false starts, finally succeeded in writing a non-annoying novel. I will even go further, and declare that in this book, Flaubert came as close as any novelist ever has to portraying the real nature of the man-eating  Catfish of Love, in all its vast stupidity.

Frederic is the most inept seducer ever, and he ends up relaying messages between the wealthy man to whom he has attached himself, the man’s wife whom he is intent on seducing, and the man’s mistress whom he is also intent on seducing (though 200 pages into the novel  he still hasn’t scored*) — and then after that he starts offering each of them relationship counseling. There’s no way those scenes could be improved. And then, when  the rich man’s lovely wife finally comes to Frederic’s place, alone — but only to wheedle a substantial never-to-be-repaid loan out of him in order to save her beloved husband from bankruptcy. Afterwards Frederic finally makes his play, after years of pining, and she  responds with a lecture on prudence that could have come from a Kansas housewife. And then finally Frederic fights a comic duel to defend the good name of M. Arnoux…. or maybe Arnoux’s wife’s good name… or maybe Arnoux’s mistress’s good name. (M. and Mme. Arnoux were the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of their time.)

However, it’s useless. It’s hard to make an antiwar movie because movies have to be exciting, and the excitement will be objectively prowar. Same for anti-drug messages. Every book about high society explains that people in high society are shallow and heartless, but high society rolls on untouched, and the moths still flock to the candle, using these novels as guidebooks. Love affairs in novels always end badly, but that makes no difference at all – people who don’t already have an incurable love itch don’t even bother to read them. The stories might have some restorative and comforting effect for those who have already been terribly singed, but they don’t keep anyone away from the flame.

CODA

Early in the morning they went to visit the palace. Going through the main gate, they saw the whole facade in front of them.: the five towers with their pointed roofs and the horseshoe staircase at the far end of the courtyard, which was flanked on the left and the right by two lower buildings. In the distance, the moss-covered paving stones blended with the fawn tint of the bricks…etc., etc.

This is the Fontainebleau Palace, and he goes on for the greater part of four pages. It’s like Sir Walter Scott.

 

NOTE

*Frederic finally does score on page 283, but you just know that his triumph will end up turning to ashes in his mouth.

The end of civilization as we wish we had known it

Berthelot went on with his dispiriting revelations, at the end of which I exclaimed:

“So it’s all over? There’s nothing left for us to do but to rear a new generation to exact vengeance?”

“No, no,” cried  Renan, standing up and going red in the face, “no, not vengeance! Let France perish, let the Nation perish; there is a higher ideal of Duty and Reason!”

“No, no,” howled the whole company. “There is nothing higher than The Nation!”.

Pages from the Goncourt Journals, Edmond and Jules Goncourt (tr. Baldick, NYRB 2007),  p.172: September 6, 1870.

The captain remarked that was fighting between the Turkish troops and the Serbians, who are in revolt. The Russians intend to stir up a quarrel and then sit by and reap their reward. Since England, France, and Germany see that it would be to their detriment if Russia were to have full access to the Dardanelles Straits, they have been earnestly deliberating as to how they might protect them…. In their hearts the Russians fear the assistance that the English might render to the Turks, so they do not dare to act presumptuously. Since the Turks have recently agreed to settle the trouble in Turkey, their joint efforts make it seem unlikely that the various powers of Europe will be embroiled in a general war. (January 13, 1877)

Kuo Sung-t’ao, The Record of an Envoy’s Journey to the West, in J.D. Frodsham, The First Chinese Embassy in the West, p. 65, Oxford, 1974

“There is nothing higher than The Nation!”. The invading Germans had just captured Napoleon III with his army, and Paris was surrounded. The Second Empire was overthrown and a provisional government proclaimed, but the military situation remained grim and within five months France would surrender and be forced to accept an unfavorable peace. Very few Frenchmen held to Renan’s humane universal values; the call for vengeance was much more compelling. (As far as that goes  Germany, now become an empire alongside Britain and in place of France, wasn’t satisfied with the outcome either, and would soon enough come back for more.)

Seven years later Kuo Sung-t’ao, the first Chinese ambassador to England, kept a record of the long sea voyage  taking him to his post. During his trip he improved his knowledge of the Western nations and the relationships between them, and as it happened, at the time when he reached the Mediterranean Russia and Turkey were engaged in a dispute about Serbia, with all the other powers hovering on the wings to keep things from getting out of hand.

“Their joint efforts make it seem unlikely that the various powers of Europe will be embroiled in a general war”, wrote the Ambassador.  And he was right for the moment, but he had put his finger on the place where the general war would in fact break out 37 years later. In 1914 it was Russia v. Austria-Hungary instead of Russia v. Turkey, but it was the same game.

The sovereign nation-state is a war machine and the international order is a system for scheduling wars.  Already by 1870 culture was pretty much at the service of the state, and by 1914 most of the left and avant-garde enthusiastically committed themselves to the murderous, pointless Great National Causes of their various homelands, all hell broke loose, and the world was never to be the same again.

The Present King of England, Scotland and Ireland

Franz Bonaventura Adalbert Maria Herzog von Bayern, King of Bavaria, England, Scotland, and Ireland

You can’t tell the players without a program

France around 1830 was rich in factions and tendencies, and you can’t read about the French literature of the first half of the 19th century without running into a large number of competing groups — political, literary, or simply social. So I have compiled a list.

France changed its form of government four times between 1787 and 1830 (plus another couple of changes during the revolutionary period), and in 1830 partisans of most of the past regimes were still around. The main political factions were the ultra-royalists, the Girondin republicans, the Jacobin republicans, the American-style republicans, the Bonapartists, and the moderate semi-liberal royalists who took power with the July Revolution. Besides these there were utopian socialist followers of Fourier or Saint-Simon, but while they got their ideas out, they didn’t really have a political role, and whatever groups the bottom 70% of the population had were regarded with fear and disdain.

The only faction that was probably lacking was one supporting the overthrown Restoration government. The Bourbons had been imposed on France by England and Germany after Napoleon’s defeat, and while they weren’t royalist enough for the ultras, they were too royalist for everyone else. This set a pattern for France — the moderate royalist regime established in 1830 didn’t make anyone happy either, and examples could be multiplied.

In the literary world, the big split was between the romantics just coming onstage, and everyone else:  the classicists, philosophes, and republicans. To begin with, the romantics were led by Charles Nodier of l’Arsenal (a library), but around 1830 Victor Hugo seized power for his Cénacle, and a little after 1830 Théophile Gautier and Petrus Borel established the Petit Cénacle, which included younger writers. (Nodier, Hugo, and Gautier became famous for praising the writing of anyone who ever brought them a manuscript.) The first two groups were just salons, but many of the members of the Petit Cénacle were housemates, and they threw rowdy parties of a type which should be familiar to many readers.

Most of the factional activity took place among the romantics. The romantic factions were Les Meditateurs, Les Frénétiques, Les Larmoyants, Les Illuminés, Le Petit Cénacle, Les Jeunes-France, Les Buveurs d’Eau, the literary Bousingots, the political Bousingots, Les Badouillards, Les  Muscardins (dormice), Les Dandys and Les Bohème.*  Dividing lines between the groups were fluid, with a lot of overlap and switching.  The heaviest action took place between 1831 (by which time the new government had succeeded in disappointing everyone)   and 1834, when violent uprisings took place and most writers became apolitical. The polemical fervor of these groups belies the fact that most of them, if they had any politics at all, were vaguely republican or liberal and never much more than that. The battles were cultural.

Most of the countercultural forms and rituals now in effect anywhere in the world can be traced to this period, so the reader who has mastered the categories listed above will be well-equipped to pigeonhole writers and counterculturalists of almost any era.

Of the French political factions, only the moderate royalists really had a chance, since France or Germany would have intervened if an assertive Napoleonic or republican government had been established. Political moderation (le juste milieu) was invented during the July Monarchy at the same time as counterculturalism, and it really couldn’t have been any other way. Le juste milieu produces minimally tolerable government which doesn’t make anyone happy, and that seems to be the best that we can hope for.

*Les éclectiques and Les doctrinaires were not romantics and belonged to an earlier period.

Why the Mongols?

For a long time I’ve been working on the history of Inner Eurasia, with special attention to Genghis Khan and the founding of  the Mongol Empire. Recently I’ve returned to that and have picked up an old project again.  The piece is long and outside the normal Haquelebac(TM)  series, so I’ve put it on a page instead of a front page post.  It’s intended as a general overview of attempts to explain the Mongol Empire, plus my own proposed explanations. Hopefully it will at least put to rest a few ancient and revered errors.

It’s a disjointed monster of a piece, sketchily documented for now and abbreviated at the end because I ran out of time. I originally intended to submit it to this to this quarter’s Military History Carnival, and may have succeeded in doing so.

Why the Mongols?

Revisionism needs revision

Pamela Pilbeam, The 1830 Revolution in France, St. Martins Press , 1991

J.H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History, Chicago, 1979

Bourgeois doesn’t mean a citizen with the rights of the city. A duke may be bourgeois in the indirect sense in which the word has been used for the past thirty years or so. Bourgeois, in France, means roughly the same as philistine in Germany, and it means everyone, whatever his position, who is not initiated in the arts or doesn’t understand them.

Theophile Gautier, in Le Moniteur universel, Dec. 31, 1855

Bohemian and bousingot studies required me to learn about France’s July Revolution, and Pilbeam’s thoroughly-documented book told me what I needed to know. But I have a bone to pick.

Pilbeams book is revisionist. She argues against the idea that the 1830 revolution was a bourgeois revolution, even though that’s what people called it at the time.  (Karl Marx was 12 years old when the revolution took place; the “bourgeois revolution” label was already there when he started studying history. )  Her argument consists of flinging whatever she can fling, without arguing against any specific statement of the thesis she rejects, and without spending any time discussing the various things that the term “bourgeois revolution” might mean.

She extends her argument to the 1789 revolution and the Napoleonic Empire (not bourgeois either!) and makes the corresponding argument about the Ancien Regime and the Restoration (which were apparently pretty darn bourgeois). If you gather everything together she said (which she doesn’t do) you would conclude that France in 1837 was more or less as bourgeois as it had been fifty years earlier. Her argument is that  neither the bourgeoisie nor the aristocracy was ever united, that neither class was class-conscious, that the political leadership in every era (and the leadership of the Restoration and both revolutions) included both aristocrats and bourgeoisie, and that in 1830, after all the hooplah, the aristocracy was still in a strong position.

Her argument amounts to taking the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy simply as groups of individuals and asking at every point which individuals were influential and what class they belonged to, and she concludes that nothing much changed, since the influential groups in every era included members of both classes. But this amounts to begging the question, and assuming her conclusion that all of these changes were mere political revolutions (personnel changes at the top) rather than social revolutions. She does not focus on the social institutions of the various era and the changes made at the transitions. (Pilbeam does confirm half the meaning of the term  “bourgeois revolution” when she says that urban workers, the ones who fought in the streets in 1830, gained little or nothing from the July Revolution. Even though the workers made the revolution, whatever it was, it was not a workers’ revolution.)

A different interpretation of the term “bourgeois revolution” would just say that between 1787 and 1837 the society became more bourgeois and less aristocratic. The bourgeoisie of 1786 had to accommodate themselves to an aristocratic society, where aristocrats had various privileges and the bourgeoisie suffered various disabilities, whereas in 1838 most of the aristocratic privileges and bourgeois disabilities were gone, and aristocrats had to accommodate themselves to a bourgeois society. The superior interpretation would also note that the diminution in the power of the Church (which Pilbeam does grant) was a loss for the aristocracy, since the Church was an important ally of theirs against the bourgeoisie, and that freedom of the press was a powerful anti-aristocratic institution. (In the words of Marquis de la Mole in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, “It’s war to the death between freedom of the press and our existence as gentlemen”).

As far as that goes, maybe those who called the July revolution “the bourgwois revolution” only meant it in Gautier’s sense, which predated Marx’s. (Presumably many studies exist of the relationships between leftist and avant-garde opposition to the bourgeoisie, but I have not read them.) 

Revisionism, like Marxism, is a canned storyline. After you’ve done your research, you cram it into the “Rising Bourgeoisie” story line if you’re a Marxist, and if you’re a revisionist you cram it into the “Shit Happens” quagmire theory of history. I find it particularly annoying that revisionists are happy to be sniping parasites, and are satisfied once they have discredited the received theory and don’t feel the need to gather things together and propose a different theory, but that’s just another case of the dutiful postmodern suspicion of Grand Narratives.

I was first introduced to revisionism 45 years ago when I was assigned Hexter’s Reappraisals in History. I loved the book, but enough is enough. “Rewriting history” is what historians do, but “revisionism” is the brand name of a storyline we can do without.

My Fossil Railroad

(Update Below: June 1, 2010)

During my bicycle-barhopping expeditions in the Wobegon area I keep running into the Soo Line, often in little country towns that barely exist (Miltona + Carlos +  Forada, combined population 805, 5 or 6 taverns). This freight line, which kept chugging  along when the famous passenger railroads dwindled and almost died*, was founded by a Minneapolis milling group in 1883, during the era when the milling and railroad monopolies were competing to screw the farmers and each other. Its original purpose was to bypass Chicago and ship flour from Sault St. Marie to the East by boat. (“Soo” comes from “Sault”.)

This railway is now part of Canadian Pacific and has  been Canadian-controlled since 1888, and with connections to Winnipeg and Vancouver in addition to Minneapolis and Chicago, it is part of the Canadian network as well as the American.  It runs almost entirely through what are or once were wheat-growing areas, and in Minnesota it runs southeast from the northwest corner of the state (where there is nothing) through a thinly-populated area to Minneapolis — along the way it carefully avoiding Grand Forks, Fargo-Moorhead, Fergus Falls, and  St. Cloud (the only towns of any size).

The interesting thing for me is that the northern part of the Soo Line route almost exactly follows the “woods trail” of the fur trade’s old Red River oxcart trails (which remained in use into the 1860s, less than 20 years before the rail line was built.)  Where the oxcart trail turned east at Ottertail (pop. 533, but once an important place), the rail route drops south and hooks up to the east plains trail, which it follows to Glenwood or a little beyond, and then diverges again and goes directly to Minneapolis-St. Paul instead of cutting over to Saint Cloud as the oxcart trail did.

The Soo Line and the sleepy little towns on it (which were built as railroad towns in the first place) are relics of history, more Wobegonian than Wobegon, as if they hadn’t gotten the word that railroads are a thing of the past.  As far as oxcarts go (from back when railroads were a thing of the future),  there’s no sign of them left except some scattered French family names and place names.

Before the Plains of Abraham, Minnesota was on the border between Quebec and Louisiana, and half the state remained nominally French until the Louisiana Purchase.  The Pembina area in the northwest was settled by Europeans much earlier than anywhere to the south, and until after the Civil War it was oriented to Winnipeg and Hudson’s Bay rather than southwards, so that northern Minnesota formed an interzone between the U.S. and Canada (or the U.S. and the Métis). The oxcart trail allowed the fur traders up north to escape the toils of the Hudson’s Bay Company  by trading in Saint Paul. (Immediately after the Civil War there was talk about Minnesota annexing adjacent areas of Canada all the way to the Pacific, but nothing came of that.)

As Hawthorne pointed out long ago, and as Henry James and T.S. Eliot reminded us, and as our teachers also reminded us if we made the mistake of majoring in English, we Americans don’t have old ruined castles &c, so we have to make do with what we’ve got.

* A number of bicycle trails around here have been built on the right-of-ways of decommissioned railroads. One I frequently use used to be part of the mighty Great Northern’s transcontinental route.

Update

The Soo Line, Patrick Dorin, Superior Publishing, 1979

This book is for primarily for railroad buffs and includes dozens of pictures of locomotives, trains, depots, and bridges. For me, looking at  photographs of big black steam engines one after another is terribly nostalgic, since they were discontinued in 1954 when I was eight years old, and I was very sorry to see them replaced by the much less dramatic diesel engines. Steam locomotives are still a great metaphor for power, since they’re noisy and smoky and black, unlike the slick new diesels.

A nineteenth century map in the book clearly shows the line’s original orientation toward Sault St. Marie in one direction and Winnipeg in the other, while the 1970 map shows every station stop on the whole line. There seems to be a stop about every 7 miles, probably based on the old watering stops, and the map explains a lot of tiny, otherwise mysterious towns out in the middle of nowhere. In the 170 or so miles between Moose Lake (not too far from Duluth) and Plummer (in NW Minnesota, not near anything) the map shows 28 stops, of which 26 are still on today’s highway maps, all but two of them with fewer than 1000 people and 8 of them unincorporated.

(Links below)

Blogging Glob’s “Bog People” bog

P.V. Glob, tr. Bruce-Mitford, The Bog People, 1965/1969.

Without having read it, I’ve been citing this bog (“book” = “bog” in Danish) for years now just for the euphony, and now I can trump that.

Even without the snappy title the book would be intrinsically worth reading, if only for the 64 pages of well-done black and white pictures of ~ 2,000 years old human sacrifices and other relics. Ideal bog conditions (not every bog will do) have preserved many bodies so well that they’re often thought to be recent murder victims, and one body was successfully fingerprinted. Such finds are common in Denmark, neighboring areas of Germany and the Netherlands, and parts of the British Isles (but not Sweden or Norway).

Glob’s archaeology is presumably out of date (too much mutterrecht, for one thing), but his history of how these discoveries have been handled in Denmark over the centuries is interesting.  In every era the police have usually been called first, with the local priest called next during  the earliest period, either to give the bodies a Christian burial or to exorcise them. During the 19th century bodies were sometimes treated as curiosities and could become circus exhibits,  but nowadays everything is routinely handled by scientists.

In 1950s a tabloid newspaper claimed that the recently-discovered  Tollund Man was a recent murder victim, but that hooplah died down once the radiocarbon dating came in.  In one instance the railway freight agent rather unreasonably insisted on charging the high fresh-cadaver price for the shipment of a bog body, even though it was encased in a much larger quantity of peat, which ships much more cheaply. (This will remind some Americans of an old humor piece, “Pigs is pigs”, in which a railway agent charges the per-hog price for shipping guinea pigs.)

Sinister bogs figure in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Hamsun’s Mysteries, and presumably many other Scandinavian literary works. And since Christ’s death on the cross was an atonement and substitute for this kind of spring sacrifice, my post is timely.

An iron law of literary history

Petrus Borel the Lycanthrope

Enid Starkie, Petrus Borel, New Directions, 1954

The pioneer French avant-gardeist Petrus Borel (fl. 1830-1840) was noted for his extravagant attitudes and behavior and his violently republican political beliefs. His bitter, cynical fiction sold poorly, and before he abandoned writing he lived for a considerable time in real poverty.  By and large his writings have been forgotten, and he is generally regarded as having been important as a personage, and perhaps as an influence, but not as a writer.  (On this more later;  I have some books on order and wonder whether Borel might not be due for a revival.)

Enid Starkie, by contrast, is an Anglo-Irishwoman* of good family who spent her life going from success to success and who played a major role in introducing such authors as Rimbaud to English-language readers. Her biography of Borel is good for what it is, and it also can serve as a literary history of the time. She does not have the carefulness of contemporary biographers and occasionally takes stories too much at face value, but that’s more than made up for by the good anecdotes she passes along as a consequence of that.

The problem with Starkie is this: like every other biographer of a starving artist I’ve ever read, from time to time Starkie feels compelled to kibitz , or to wonder why Borel did the things he did, or to suggest maybe he was partly at fault for his difficulties, or to suggest other ways he could have gone at things. Borel is not the best case to make my point, since the value of his work is uncertain, but I have also seen similar attitudes taken toward artists like Musorgsky, Satie, and Nerval whose merit is unquestioned.

Subject to correction, I would like to generalize this into a law. There are no starving or avant-garde biographers. The biographers of starving artists will always have more common sense and be much more comfortably situated than their biographees, and in every case some degree of condescension must slip into their work. Readers are invited to suggest counterexamples.

As a corrective principle I’d like to propose that if the person you’re writing the biography of has been dead for a century or more, they should (except for idiot kings, mass murderers, etc.) be assumed to deserve a considerable degree of respect; whereas the same is not necessarily true of biographers.

* Along with Joanna Richardson’s The Bohemians and Pamela Pilbeam’s The 1830 Revolution in France, Starkie’s book has also led me to suspect that well-born Englishwomen, however hyphenated, are not the best choices for writing about Frenchpersons of any description.

Victor Hugo on Cephalopods

To believe in the octopus, one must have seen it. Compared with it, the hydras of old are laughable.

Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod were only able to make the Chimaera; God made the octopus. When God wills it, he excels in the execrable. And all ideals being admitted, if terror be the object, the octopus is a masterpiece.

Its most terrible quality is its softness. A glutinous mass possessed of a will — what more frightful? Glue filled with hatred.

At night and in its breeding season, it is phosphorescent. This terror has its passions. It awaits the nuptial hour. It adorns itself, it lights up, it illuminates itself; and from the summit of a rock one can see it beneath, in the shadowy depths, spread out in a pallid irradiation, — a spectre sun.

It has no bones, it has no blood, it has no flesh. It is flabby. There is nothing in it. It is a skin. One can turn the eight tentacles wrong side out, like the fingers of a glove.

The creature superimposes itself upon you by a thousand mouths; the hydra incorporates itself with the man; the man amalgamates himself with the hydra. You form but one. This dream is upon you. The tiger can only devour you; the octopus, oh horror! breathes you in. It draws you to it, and into it, and bound, ensnared, powerless, you slowly feel yourself emptied into that frightful pond, which is the monster itself.

Beyond the terrible, being eaten alive, is the inexpressible, being drunk alive.

(Excerpted from five pages of Toilers of the Sea, II iv 2, “The Monster”: Toilers of the Sea, p. 157; Les Travailleurs de la mer, p. 199)

This passage, which has been cobbled together from the most vivid lines of a long chapter, adequately represents Hugo’s capacity for excess.

For me, Hugo is an enormous nuisance. One of the great writers and public intellectuals of the 19th century, dominant in French poetry for decades, prolific for sixty years or more (he kept on writing after Rimbaud quit), the source of a hundred or so movie scripts, Hugo remains internationally popular to this day. But I find him impossible to read. It’s very fortunate that this post is part of a series about cephalopods in literature and philosophy and not about Hugo. (Aristotle is linked below, and Erasmus is next, and then maybe Melville).

Since Les Travailleurs de la mer was published in 1866, the Guernsey dialect name for the octopus used by Hugo, pieuvre, has replaced the older name poulpe, which is now used only in cooking. Hugo’s book “spawned an unusual fad in Paris: Squids. From squid dishes and exhibitions, to squid hats and parties, Parisians became fascinated by these unusual sea creatures, which at the time were still considered by many to be mythical.“*  Three years later Verne’s 10,000 Leagues under the Sea kept the squid fad alive, and perhaps the origination of the squid dystopia should be added to Hugo’s many other accomplishments. (Hugo’s monster is clearly an octopus, but fads aren’t picky about details.)

* This citation has been doubted and is probably junk wiki. It’s been labelled “citation needed” for at least 18 months by now. Like every other wiki article it has spammed the internet.  

Hugo was a pioneer radical Catholic, along with his friend Lamennais, and his horrible novelistic octopus is often thought to be symbolic of  the insidious and irresistible power of capitalism:

The creature superimposes itself upon you by a thousand mouths; the hydra incorporates itself with the man; the man amalgamates himself with the hydra. You form but one. This dream is upon you. It draws you to it, and into it, and bound, ensnared, powerless, you slowly feel yourself emptied into that frightful pond, which is the monster itself.

Beyond the terrible, being eaten alive, is the inexpressible, being drunk alive.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned….

ARISTOTLE ON THE SEX LIFE OF THE SQUID: