Time & Perspective Quote by Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert’s image is a self-own with teeth: the writer as street performer, hammering noise out of a broken instrument, trying to make something like music for an audience that may only be listening the way a bear “listens” to a handler’s drum. The cracked kettle is doing double duty. It’s language as a flawed tool - blunt, dented, too ordinary for what we want from it - and language as a kind of shabby showbiz, a public act that risks turning art into spectacle.

The subtext is Flaubert’s central anxiety about the novel: the gap between what experience feels like and what sentences can ever deliver. We “long to move the stars to pity” is not just romantic grandiosity; it’s the private, almost embarrassing desire that art might reach beyond human chatter and touch something absolute, cosmic, indifferent. Then reality intervenes: the work is still made of words, and words are compromised by convention, cliché, and the reader’s appetite for easy rhythms.

Context matters. Flaubert is the patron saint of precision, the man of le mot juste, and this is the dark joke behind that devotion: even perfect phrasing can’t fix the instrument. The line lands because it admits both sides of the novelist’s hustle - the lofty metaphysical ambition and the humiliating mechanics of craft. It’s not a defeatist shrug; it’s a dare to keep striking the kettle anyway, to coax from damage a tune that might, briefly, make the room feel bigger than itself.