<i> The following is excerpted from Nobel laureate Claude Simon’s novel “The Battle of Pharsalus” (translated by Richard Howard): </i>

The slow brush moving horizontally its load of bright-red pigment relatively liquid so that as it proceeds the color runs producing tiny dribbles the thick and bloody line it leaves behind it extending lengthening presenting in its rigidity slight swellings, faint bulges as the hand directing the brush subject to imperceptible tremors imperceptible palpitations of the blood flowing through it and of the muscles supporting it approaches or moves away from the canvas alternately relieving the pressure on the bristles or on the contrary flattening them crushing them so that then not only does the line widen but the accumulated paint overflows and slides down the vertical surface until having reached the end of its course and almost the end of its reserve of pigment the brush flattens a little more than ceases to advance its horizontal progress yielding to a rotating movement the bristles revolving enlarging a point a dot drawing a kind of red inflamed ball or bud the bright color gleaming like enamel a stiff rigid swollen bar standing out like the folds of those pinkish scars the sphere at the end aimed toward a vague white patch more or less delimited by two U’s side-by-side or rather the Greek letter omega of some peeling or enameled substance I was suffering like . . . .