Madame Bovary

"At last Leon swore he would not see Emma again, and he reproached himself with not having kept his word, considering all the worry and lectures this woman might still draw down upon him, without reckoning the jokes made by his companions as they sat round the stove in the morning. Besides, he was soon to be head clerk; it was time to settle down. So he gave up his flute, exalted sentiments, and poetry; for every bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were it but for a day, a moment, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of lofty enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet."

Is this an accurate description of the necessary sacrifices of a lawyer--to give up the passions and lofty enterprises of youth. Is Flaubert correct that his young lawyer "bears within him the debris of a poet?" Must the poet die or is there a way to integrate the one with the other? It is Friday night at the beginning of spring break, and you would have no problem finding a seat in the library tonight. There are some students here, but you could give them each their own floor. I would probably not be here if I was not at my post at the circulation desk working for my federally backed $6.50 /hour work study position (emphasis on study). The only work involved is checking out study guides and books to students, answering an occasional "where is" question and, everyone's favorite, keeping up on the arcane task of weekly update filing for subscription services. In case you have have no idea what I am talking about, the library, despite most people researching online, receives weekly supplements to volumous texts on a variety of subjects. My job has been consistently to update the United States Tax Reporter, a tedious exercise of removing pages 27,683z-2.13--27,683z-30 and replacing it with the same pages plus one or too. Your mind goes numb from trying to remember numbers in the 10,000's and the filing usually takes about two hours per update. I was once working through the 20 some odd volumes when a practicing lawyer who was using the library came by, laughing, and said. "You guys still do that. That was my job in law school years ago. The United States Tax Reporter is the worst." Well, this is why it is so important for me to find a law job. There must be a better use of my time than as a sorting machine, something that has at least a slight semblance of the poetry of law, or prose, or even a simple aphorism.