Zest for Life

"..., her only form of pleasure was to watch the sea, so perpetually alive, whether livid in the dark days of December or delicately green with shimmering lights like watered silk in the early May sunshine."

Emile Zola, Zest for Life

My new favourite author. Reading this last night I realised that I had found a replacement for "my muse", such writing I had previously attributed to her and a personal-myth about Eastern culture. Yet here is that same writing in the hands of a Frenchman, using it is true reference to silk, an eastern material, but never-the-less articulating what he called Naturalism - that same view of the world that I sort.

So I am free from the mistaken belief that such a view belongs to any people, that I need a particular people to have this view - it lies in Europe, in Zola and in Myself. I knew this but I needed proof.