'We were joined in an infinity so pure that I never thought of death...'

As that word 'pure' fell from her lips, I heard the trembling of the plaintive 'u,' the icy limpidity of the 'r,' and the sound aroused nothing in me but the need to hear again its unique resonance, its echo of a drop that trickles out, breaks off, and falls somewhere with a splash. The word 'pure' has never revealed an intelligible meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench an optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it - in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very centre of a dense crystal.



Colette - Ces plaisirs, Le pur et l'impur, 1932

Deja petites madeleines

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detatched, with no suggestion of its origin.
I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.
Undoubtedly what is this palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too confused and chaotic; scarcely can I perceive the neutral glow into which the elusive whirling medley of stirred-up colours is fused, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate for me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste, cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, from what period in my past life...
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.


Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way

"for each of them secrets something that is not to be found in another..."

As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the universe had appeared to me more interesting.


Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time Vol. II

Philippe's primeval dream,

in which love, by outstripping the requisite age for love, surpassed the generous limits of its own boundaries, had plunged him far back among solitudes where he was lord and master. He wandered past a grotto - a slung hammock hollowed by a naked form and the embers of a wood fire flickering at ground level - before the power of divination deserted him and the wings of his imagination were clipped, and he plummeted headlong down till he touched the cushioned depths of the deepest sleep.

Colette - Le Blé en Herbe, 1923

To write

is the joy and torment of the idle. Oh to write! From time to time I feel a need, sharp as thirst in summer, to note and describe. And then I take up my pen again and attempt the perilous and elusive task of seizing and pinning down, under its flexible double-pointed nib, the many-hued fugitive, thrilling adjective... The attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar.

Colette - The Vagabond, 1911

ad ogni passo

Dior - Vogue Italia, 1966

Naissance de Venus

Alexandre Cabanel - Naissance de Venus (The Birth of Venus), 1863

Nyx

William-Adolphe Bouguerau - La Nuit, 1883

take me back to Giverny

the belly of paris

swallow me whole.

french sensory box

ENVISION : Step into the sensory box from SUPERBIEN on Vimeo.

Sartre

We write for our contemporaries; we want to behold our world not with future eyes - which would be the surest means of killing it - but with our eyes of flesh, our real, perishable eyes. We don't want to win our case on appeal, and we have will have nothing to do with any posthumous rehabilitation. Right here in our own lifetime is when and where our cases will be won or lost.

voltaire

Une compagnie de graves tyrans est inaccessible à toutes les séductions.
A company of solemn tyrants is impervious to all seductions.
"Tyranny" (1764)

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.
The better is the enemy of the good.
"La Bégueule" (1772)

Rien n’est si ordinaire que d’imiter ses ennemis, et d’employer leurs armes.
Nothing is so common as to imitate one's enemies, and to use their weapons.
"Oracles" (1770)

Il est dangereux d’avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort.
It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.
"Le Siècle de Louis XIV" (1752)

Les habiles tyrans ne sont jamais punis.
Clever tyrants are never punished.
"Mérope," act V, scene V (1743)

Le secret d'ennuyer est celui de tout dire.
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
"Sixième discours: sur la nature de l'homme," Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme (1738)

L'homme est libre au moment qu'il veut l'être.
Man is free at the instant he wants to be.
"Brutus," act II, scene I (1730)

nothing like sunshine

À bout de souffle (Breathless), 1960

Jean-Luc Godard
François Truffaut

wildcat down

You are beautiful
so half the human race will be your enemy

You are brilliant
and you will be feared

You are trusting
and you will be betrayed...

Voltaire, 'Epistel on Calumn' 1735, upon meeting Emilie du Chatelet

the sun burns, the moonlight burnishes

refining gesture - olga berluti

soucie-toi de toi-même

"Taking care if oneself requires knowing [connaître] oneself."

"But if you take proper care of yourself, that is, you know ontologically what you are, if you know what you are capable of, if you know what it means for you to be a citizen of a city, to be the master of a household in an oikos, if you know what things you should and should not fear, if you know what you can reasonably hope for and, on the other hand, what things should not matter to you, if you know, finally, that you should not be afraid of death - if you know all this, you cannot abuse your power over others. Thus, there is no danger."

(Michel Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom)

Petiatil Cx Htdui

At this point, man withdrew and fled.

Then the animals ate him.

It was not a rape,
he lent himself to the obscene meal.

He relished it,
he learned himself
to act like an animal
and to eat rat
daintily.

And where does this foul debasement come from?

The fact that the world is not yet formed,
or that man has only a small idea of the world
and wants to hold on to it forever?

This comes from the fact that man,
one fine day,
stopped
the idea of the world.

Two paths were open to him:
that of the infinite without,
that of the infinitesimal within.

And he chose the infinitesimal within.

(Antonin Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgement of God)