THE PERPETUAL ORGY (COMMENT). Jonathan Raban commented here on my post of October 16, quoting Flaubert on the joys of writing. I am going to repeat the quote here (I am never sure that the comments are read, which is why I flag some of them with the word “comment” in parentheses).
“For better or worse, it is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.”
This wonderful passage fits with a quotation from Flaubert in the book by Mario Vargas Llosa, which has the title THE PERPETUAL ORGY. The title comes from a sentence in a Flaubert letter: “The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.”