[...] Flaubert told Maupassant that 'talent is a slow patience', and that 'there is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought to the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown. We must find it.' [...]

the piles of intellectual slack which truss these schlemiels like babies

We begin the obituary in laughter and end it in tears, in a sublime dapple of emotions

the artist's quizzical and ludic force