Stream

Okay, so Flaubert was an aesthete and I can relate, but only at certain times: Like in '04 when I was drunk and saw Wilco and everything was beautiful, or this weekend when I walked over a dune and through the fog on the Oregon beach, and saw the glow of a bonfire reflecting off the sky and it looked like Kuwait burning in the first gulf war: violent and beautiful. I need to read Walter Benjamin's 'On Hashish' and finish that Biography of William James because they are both interested in "experience." And then there is Thoreau, who was evidently a Perfectionist (in the philospohical sense, not the silly everyday sense); he tried to extract an example of how to be (ever-changing but moving toward the real self) from everything around him in nature...Damn, I've only read part of 'Walden' but this is all tied together and Emerson used to hang out with William James' father and I think Walt Whitman lived in Brooklyn and could look out over what is now the Brooklyn Bridge, just like one of the Roeblings (probably the younger) did after having his foot crushed by a boat coming in to dock