The question of stopping is really a decision of moral considerations. To what extent are you intoxicated by the actual act, so that you are beguiled by it? To what extent are you charmed by its inner life? And to what extent do you then really approach the intention or desire that is really outside it? The decision is always made when the piece has something in it that you wanted. —Barnett Newman "The events of human life, be they public or private,” Balzac wrote, “are so intimately bound up with architecture, that the majority of observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in the full reality of their behavior, from the remnants of their public monuments or the examination of their domestic remains.” The novel in which this passage appears—The Pursuit of the Absolute—thus begins with a description of a specific house in a specific street in a specific town: a lodging in the rue de Paris in Douai, “the physiognomy, the interior disposition, and the details of which have, more than any of the other houses, retained the character of the old Flemish buildings, so naively appropriate to the patriarchal mores of that good country.”
