Révolte

I lay the mind's contents 
Bare, as upon a table,
And ask, in a time of war,
Whether there is still
To a mind frivolously dull
Anything worth living for
                        --Allen Tate

Stendhal lived during a time of uneasy transition between the Enlightenment, which, in a rare moment of personal exasperation, a fifty year old McGuire exclaimed, "I refuse to teach it!", but in all fairness, Pope has that effect on me as well, with his trilling mock heroic verse, and the burgeoning dawn of global superpower which the Victorian age would bequeath to the 20th century. The world that Stendhal presents to readers is delightfully manicured, much more so than in the Balzac who purportedly supersedes him (and for those of you not familiar with how the dowager handles majority consensus by now, she exclaims "fuck that," and would be stranded on a desert island with Stendhal over  Balzac any day) but it is still a pre-industrial world with a vain and petty aristocracy, wallowing in Napoleon's tragic grandeur, a world where men controlled women, selecting and discarding them like a deck of cards, as long as the female in question was desirable, regretting not studying this nearly unparalleled author with my French professor.

Though I am not sure how France 2 works, in comparison to RAI in Italy, I am now writing in rare protest. to my cultured aesthetes across the pond: Some classical authors cannot be faithfully adapted on screen. Stendhal is one such author, even if curiosity overcame me to see what was done with The Charterhouse of Parma, to realize it is a more superficial variation of Julien's story in Le Rouge et Le Noir. Certainly, Stendhal's world of backstabbing principalities can influence screenplays, but some canonical material should remain just that, canonical, not bootstrapped by the props department to offer sensibilities of the baroque slowly crumbling to egalitarian lies. Not that I do not appreciate the derivative, and in the case of pop culture like Star Trek, even prefer it, but more often than not, adaptations detract from the engagement with literary imagination, with the exception  of Dickens and his Christmas Carol, which is probably known by heart even by Boko Haram. While we may meet our doom enhancing our bodies out of species sustainability,  enhancing our cultural historical memory through the ascendancy of video as the supreme medium can have its drawbacks. As opposed to being enacted, great narratives need to be read. And if some of you are going to object with a question like "What about Victor Hugo?" Hugo's flaws are tightened when they become musicals, movies.