Madame Bovary

Today is a joke, this whole winter has been a joke. It was sixty degrees earlier today and I was warm even in my light jacket walking around my neighborhood. I do love jokes, though. This weather makes me so smiley and I almost cannot believe that we are going to outrun the police chasing us, that surely they will catch up with us and cover us in snow and painfully cold temperatures. There have only been two really cold weeks so far this year, no big snowfalls, and I am okay with that, more than okay with that. February is two days away and then it is March and then Winter is over. It's almost like it never happened.

I finished Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary this morning. My job is again out of work and so I am really glad that I worked all those shifts when they had them. That publishing job has not called me back since I called them this morning. I fear that she reexamined my resume and realized that she must have been drunk when she called me before, that I am totally lacking in the qualifications they asked for. But there is still some time left in this workday for her to call me back.

I am about to start D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover after I down some more coffee and write a bit. The opening lines of this book are lines I have read again and again many times in my game that I like to play of picking books up at bookstores and reading the opening paragraph. It's up there with Anna Karenina and The Great Gatsby with opening lines that people know by heart. In case you have forgotten how good it is:

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."