Here is an author who understands flow.

'I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know.
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Indeed, The Elegance of the Hedgehog bears witness to the efficacy of Ms. Barbery's altered state.  As I read, I scratched myriad rich quotes in a notebook.  But a novel tells its own story; out of context, words can lose their sheen.  Talking about a story, unless you are a very good ventriloquist, is hard to do.

Risking this, let me quote the protagonist, Renée, as she contemplates a Japanese masterpiece.

The camellia against the moss of the temple, the violet hues of the Kyoto mountains, a blue porcelain cup - this sudden flowering of pure beauty at the heart of ephemeral passion; is this not something we all aspire to?  And something that, in our Western civilization, we do not know how to attain?

I wonder if it's true, that a culture keen on acquisition and scalability handicaps its artists' sense of the ephemeral.  Can pure beauty walk this earth of concrete and billboards without becoming some means-to-end, cheap trick, fast talking ad copy?

Ms. Barbery has managed to release a thing of beauty within the constraints of the French publishing industry.  A Time review notes her novel 'seems to have scored a direct hit on the global zeitgeist.'  Her book is both marketable and majestic, begging the question: did she write as a hermit in a cave, oblivious of Western civilization's crass requirements?  Perhaps her Philosophy pedagogy gives her wings to transcend culture*?

I'm writing this, contemplative, in the tech-free zone of an Ohio thunderstorm.  I've labored long, with others, to make Monet's Orbit a recording of 'pure beauty at the heart of ephemeral passion.'  But, unlike Muriel Barbery, I have no champion of my work.  

Surely this has been the bane of the artist through time (even the Asian artist Ms. Barbery so admires?).  To straddle dissonant worlds - creation and distribution, art and advertising, sensitivity and toughness - is perhaps not the artist's forte.

Very often I'm wearily tempted to lay down my implements in favor of consuming the output of world class artists.  Awe is a worthy high, no?

I can certainly find a quote from this lovely novel to talk me out of abandoning my muse, but I'll refrain.  As much as my Western mind finds it a sin to give up on a bona fide talent, right and wrong are a bit more subtle than all that.  So I'll close with this one:

With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of Art, I don't see much else that can nurture human life...I'm not just talking about great works of art by great masters... I'm referring to the beauty that is there in the world, things that, being part of the movement of life, elevate us.
Twelve year old Paloma, character in The Elegance of the Hedgehog

*Muriel Barbery now lives in Japan, where she devotes herself full-time to writing.

Public domain ink on scroll painting by Yokoyama Taikan, Holy peaks of Chichibu at spring dawn