I’m in a mood for Flaubert. I love the way he searched endlessly for le mot juste (the exact – uniquely correct – word, the most precisely accurate language). Sometimes he found the words that evoked and carried more truth than any fact could possibly do. Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue. For none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and language is a cracked…
I’m out of books to read. I’ve read everything I have, some things two or three times. Today I reread Douglas Coupland’s Life After God. These are the two passages that struck me, compellingly, again. Our conversations are never easy, but as I — we — get older, we are all finding that our conversations must be spoken. A need burns inside us to share with others what we are feeling. Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic….
A major find in Western Cypress, in an already-looted tomb near the village of Kouklia, in the coastal Paphos area. The area contained several ancient cemeteries that belonged to the town of Palaepaphos, site of a temple to Aphrodite (goddess of beauty and love, believed to have risen from the waves of the nearby sea). The sarcophagus is 2500 years old, and its ornate illustrations are painted in red, black, and blue on a white background. Experts believe that some…