xposted from (God help us) Tumblr

Hey all you naifs who reblogged this snippet! I “hearted” it (O modern nomenclature) and scrolled on, only to wonder later, Why the hell would Louis-Ferdinand Celine, genius and psycho, say something as soppy as that? Turns out he didn’t mean it to be that soppy.

Context is a wonderful thing:
 
Woman is very troubled, because clearly she has every kind of known weakness. She needs … she wants to stay young. She has her menopause, her periods, the whole genital business, which is very delicate, it makes a martyr out of her, doesn’t it, so this martyr lives anyway, she bleeds, she doesn’t bleed, she goes and gets the doctor, she has operations, she doesn’t have operations, she gets re-operated, then in between she gives birth, she loses her shape, all that’s important. She wants to stay young, keep her figure, well. She doesn’t want to do a thing and she can’t do a thing. She hasn’t any muscle. It’s an immense problem … hardly recognized. It supports the beauty parlors, the quacks, and the druggists. But it doesn’t present an interesting medical situation, woman’s decline. It’s obviously a fading rose, you can’t say it’s a medical problem, or an agricultural problem. In a garden, when you see a rose fade, you accept it. Another one will bloom. Whereas in woman, she doesn’t want to die. That’s the hard part.
 
…..that doesn’t sound quite so Hallmarky, now does it?

(I unhearted it. The modern form of protest. I guess.) 


-- I mean for Chrissakes, it was Celine! Certified wingnut! It would be like Genet saying "A pretty girl is like a melody"! You wouldn't just reblog that and move on, would you?....well....well obviously people would. They're probably all the same people who reblogged that fake Virginia Woolf quote. sigh.