Flaubert's close ups

Flaubert writes cinematically. The following paragraph reminds me of scenes like the opening of Bergman's Cries and Whispers, and of that febrile distortion of focus I remember from lying in bed sick as a child, where the clock on the far wall with a dog's face seemed so close.

"Il arriva un jour vers trois heures; tout le monde était aux champs; il entra dans la cuisine, mais n’aperçut point d’abord Emma; les auvents étaient fermés. Par les fentes du bois, le soleil allongeait sur les pavés de grandes raies minces, qui se brisaient à l’angle des meubles et tremblaient au plafond. Des mouches, sur la table, montaient le long des verres qui avaient servi, et bourdonnaient en se noyant au fond, dans le cidre resté. Le jour qui descendait par la cheminée, veloutant la suie de la plaque, bleuissait un peu les cendres froides. Entre la fenêtre et le foyer, Emma cousait; elle n’avait point de fichu, on voyait sur ses épaules nues de petites gouttes de sueur."

Bovary's hightened sensitivity is clear ... the fine detail, the flies drowning in the cider in the bottom of the glasses, and all this culminating in noticing the small beads of sweat on Emma's shoulders.

Don't look back

"The pains people endure would be less if only ... they did not put so much imaginitive energy into recalling the memory of past misfortune, rather than bear an indifferent present with equanimity." - Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther' (p.25, Penguin classic).

This is Buddhism.

The medieval idea of hope - at least as portrayed in Giuseppe Mazzotta's Yale lectures on Dante - as a belief that the future can redeem the past, is based on the idea that we do look back.

Which tribe was it that pictured us moving through time walking backward, because we look at the past and cannot see the future?

Which poet uses this?

Leonard Cohen talks about being blessed with a bad memory of his life.

Ingmar Bergman - in that late documentary Bergman Island - talks of a guilty conscious being an affectation.