Again, Kornel Esti by Deszö Kosztolányi

"Naturally, he gathered these observations slowly, bit by bit, something every minute, because he couldn't be indiscreet, could only watch her for short periods, as if by chance, and then fly back with the precious, stolen pollen, to make it into honey in the buzzing beehive of his imagination.

     "Once, just as he was withdrawing again to hide behind the cover of Il Cuore, frowning and reading most intently, it struck him that the girl was whispering something to her mother.

     "In fact, he had been hearing this whispering--if such it may be called--this sotto voce murmuring ever since entering the compartment. He had, however, paid no attention to it. After a while he had become accustomed to it, as to the droning of a fly in a room on a summer afternoon."

Kornel Esti 

by 

Deszö Kosztolányi

There are a lot of reasons that I love these paragraphs from Kornel Esti . . . which is well on its way to becoming one of my all time favorite novels.

First, that image of the writer as a bee gathering the pollen of experiences and observations and turning that pollen into the honey of literature. It's just lovely, isn't it?

Second, that the young boy (Kornel Esti) is hiding behind his book 1  while he observes the mother and daughter who share his compartment on the train. 

And third, because the final paragraph includes the simile of a buzzing fly, because that neatly pairs the bee and the fly--a pair which has been preoccupying a huge tract of land in my mind for the past several years as I struggle to bring forth my novel Flies & Bees (three hundred and fifty pages and counting--with no end in sight). In fact, I am going to quote this section in my novel, as it fits a whole in that area of the jigsaw puzzle quite nicely.

 1  Il Cuore is a novel by the Italian author Edmondo De Amicis, first published October 18, 1886. (How's that for specificity?) It is the author's best known work, and was apparently very popular in Fascist Italy because of its portrayal of Italian nationalism and patriotism. It is available for free from Amazon Kindle under the title Cuore (Heart): An Italian Schoolboy's Journal.