November 22, 2010

Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.

From Andre Breton's Nadja (also the source of the title of this post, which ends the novel):
Toward midnight we reach the Tuileries, where she wants to sit down for a moment.  We are in front of a fountain, whose jet she seems to be watching.  'Those are your thoughts and mine.  Look where they all start from, how high they reach, and then how it's still prettier when they fall back.  And then they dissolve immediately, driven back up with the same strength, then there's that broken spurt again, that fall . . . and so on infinitely.' (Breton, Nadja, p. 86)
The beauty of shattering thought at the core of Surrealism.

1 comment:

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