I am nearing the end of Flaubert's works after a month and a half. I've been reading them along with Frederick Brown's biography of Flaubert, published last year. This is the first time I've read everything an author wrote; I did it almost on a whim, although not exactly without reason.

I've read his books so quickly that I don't think I learned much from them, at least not as much as I could, but I've gotten something from them. Each of his books is different from the others, and everything he wrote in maturity is masterful. His interests and affinities were somewhat cramped, but his talent was unbounded. The novels stand apart from their time, as do those of all great writers; but I can't help thinking that something about them is even more set apart than other authors, that they are, in some way I can't place yet, intensely unique. Flaubert seemed to have no direct predecessors or followers. He took influences from many places but made something new with them. Many authors who came after him revered his books, but none that I know of wrote in the same vein. His works aren't part of a literary movement, and they don't seem to be products of their time (aside from the fact that they're set against the noteworthy events that took place in France during Flaubert's life). Even the most original authors, Melville, Joyce, Woolf, Nabakov, seem at least in retrospect to fit in with aesthetic trends and to exist in a community of related ideas. With Flaubert, there's nothing of the sort.

I find his life interesting as well. Flaubert impresses me as almost an alter-ego, if I had more dedication and talent. He revelled in silliness mixed with mockery, chose certain subjects of study and researched them exhaustively, and when he was writing, had style ideas rather than story ideas. But he also had ideas about relationships with women that are completely unlike mine; survived on family wealth, which I can never expect to do; and knew what he wanted to do with his life.

The idea of seriously studying literature has been a half-formed ambition of mine for some time. I still haven't figured out how best to go about it. I started studying Flaubert almost by chance: every month I read Library Journal along with the other librarians, to see if there are any books I think the library might want to acquire. Last month's issue mentioned Brown's biography of Flaubert, stating that Brown was an accomplished scholar who had succeeded at writing a definitive biography. This got my attention, since when I had read "Un coeur simple" senior year, I was impressed by how singular and origingal it was, and I've wanted to examine Flaubert's other works ever since. The library happened to have Brown's book, so I started looking through it right then, while at work, just to see what it was like; my interest grew as I read it, so I checked it out. As it began to describe the periods of Flaubert's life when he was writing his books, I decided to read each one in turn as I got up to them in the biography, so that those sections wouldn't be blank spots for me.

This is pretty indicitive of how I go about choosing what to study. I keep meaning to come up with a more logical plan for myself, but until I do, my passions will ignite and cave in on themselves almost on a regular schedule. I can't tell which of these passions would hold the most interest for me in the long term, which I would like to study in graduate school. I can't even tell if I would ultimately enjoy studying literature specifically, or if it's just curiosity.

My goal with studying German is to commit myself to a single language, randomly chosen for all intents and purposes, and master it. I've always wanted to learn a language but kept cycling from one to the next, and so I decided to pick one and linger with it. I'm hesitant to do something similar with a more broad academic study, such as the study of literature, because it would be an even more extensive commitment; because conceivably not all subjects are equally rewarding; because it's less clear how to go about it logically than it is with langauges; because almost every subject seems related to others. This is one of the great nagging questions of my present life. It seems that up until the day I die, I will be searching for the meaning and direction that should determine all of my actions. My search for meaning is a logical search, based on the clarification and exclusion of options, the desire to gain more complete knowledge so that I can manage my time more reasonably, and constant curiosity about the things I'm not doing, the people I don't know, the times I don't live in. Incidentally, Flaubert parodies just this sort of passion in his last, unfinished novel, Bouvard and Pecuchet. Perhaps if only had finished the book, I would know what to do with my life.