Flaubert the Happy Idiot
Flaubert told Maupassant to look at a tree for two hours. He said: “there is a part of everything that remains unseen, for we have fallen into the habit of remembering, whenever we use our eyes, what people before us have seen in the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest object contains the unknown. We must find it. To describe a blazing fire or a tree in a field, we must remain before that fire or that tree until they no longer resemble for us any other tree or any other fire.” Flaubert’s family commonly referred to him as “the happy idiot” because of how much he daydreamed.
Olive Grove, 1889, Vincent Van Gogh
