On the suggestion of a Symposium reader, a Mr. Howard, we dipped into Flaubert over the weekend. Salammbo must be one of the more bejwelled pieces of literature in Western civilization forged in a mental hothouse as rarified as Walter Pater's in Marius the Epicurean. These coddled haute bourgeois writers had staggering imaginations and a way with words we have surely lost.

"Living in a house is one of the sad features of civilization. I believe that we were made to sleep on our backs looking up at stars." 1858