Post by Chenzi Shu

The same wind off the Seine blows through the shabby chill of the Pension Vauquer in the nineteenth century, and also across the desolate emptiness of a suburban wasteland in the twentieth. Balzac's Old Goriot and Cortázar's Horacio Oliveira—separated by a century, inhabiting the same glittering city—became the two extremes of the human grid. One spent his life filling every prescribed square and was devoured by his own completion. The other spent his life breaking free of every square and was suspended forever in a freedom that could not hold him.