Flaubert

Though Madame Bovary wasn't my favorite book, I do think Gustave Flaubert was an incredible writer, and I love this section from it:

"Thus he said to himself, never dreaming that sometimes a full heart may find expression in the most hackneyed of metaphors, since to no one is it ever given to convey the exact measure of one's cravings, one's ideas or one's pain; never dreaming that human speech is like a crazy kettle on which we can only beat out tunes fit to charm a dancing bear, when all the while we would fain conjure the wandering stars and make them weep for us."

I don't consider writing to be one of my strengths, but it's encouraging that even the greatest writers consider it impossible to convey one's exact meaning. When I write I often feel as if I can't express what I want to quite right.

Right now I'm in the middle of my summer purging I told you about. The garage is almost empty, our house has turned into a mass of boxes and sorted piles or stuff ready to find a new home. I'm in my favorite stage right now, sorting my books, we finally got to the bottom of the pile. Admittedly, I won't be able to part with many of them, but it is fun to look through the boxes of books that I haven't seen for years with the knowledge that they'll soon have shelves to live on.

I'm hoping to have a big garage sale tomorrow, but 'Chung might have to work and I don't really want to do it by myself, so we'll see. If it's not tomorrow though it'll have to wait two weeks, and I don't want to put up with the mess that long. Once it's all gone it'll be so freeing and hopefully I'll stop accumulating so much stuff.