"A Simple Heart" by Gustave Flaubert

lizshine74by lizshine74

In On writing.

Felicite, ironically named, is never happy. Her life is full of devotion, submission and servitude. She is uneducated. She does not think for herself or have any hobbies or ambitions of her own. Her love is excessive and largely unappreciated and unreturned. There are some occasions where she receives objects of affection from her mistress and her nephew, but never any substantial gestures of love. She clings to these objects in an excessive, pathetic way. In truth, I don’t feel sympathy for her because she has no self, no identity to connect with. She clings to trinkets and remnants of lives she lived through. She is, as the title suggests, simply heart, without inspiration or direction or any of the complexity that is being human. It’s appropriate that she eventually goes blind–she’s blind all along, blindly devoted, which even for someone as simple hearted and “single-minded” as she is, does not lead to happiness or contentment. It’s a dead life she lives, full of relics of the dead, waiting for her own death.

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.