The Pleasure of the Text
Quotidienne/Daily
p. 53
Why do some people, including myself, enjoy in certain novels, biographies, and historical works the representation of the “daily life’ of an epoch, of a character? Why this curiosity about petty details: schedules, habits, meals, lodging, clothing, etc.? Is it the hallucinatory relish of “reality” (the very materiality of “that once existed”)? And is it not the fantasy itself which invokes the “detail,” the tiny private scene, in which I can easily take my place? Are there, in short, “minor hysterics” (these very readers? who receive bliss from a singular theater: not one of grandeur but one of mediocrity (might there not be dreams, fanatsies of mediocrity)?
Thus, impossible to imagine a more tenuous, a more insignificant notation than that of “today’s weather” (or yesterday’s); and yet, the other day, reading, trying to read Amiel, irritation that the well meaning editor (another person foreclosing pleasure) had seen fit to omit from this Journal the everyday details, what the weather was like on the shores of Lake Geneva, and retain only insipid moral musing: yet it is this weather that has not aged, not Amiel’s philosophy.
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