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Paris, October 3, 1875
Today, I stood again before Daguerre’s merciless invention, unable to dispel the bitterness it stirs in me. Each photograph, in its cold precision, seemed to silently mock my cherished pursuit of beauty. Where once I beheld shadows as intimate, living mysteries, the camera now unveiled starkness, slicing through illusion with indifferent precision. Is this clarity not a violence against all I hold dear?
What troubles me most profoundly is the quiet, unnoticed corrosion this technology unleashes upon our sensibilities. Friends hail it as progress, an effortless triumph — yet I see in their eagerness a surrender, an abandonment of effort, as though our own eyes had grown weary of seeking.
They surrender willingly to this swift, mechanized vision, losing, perhaps irreversibly, the patient contemplation of the brushstroke, the tremulous uncertainty of the poet’s hand. How cruelly ironic, that man’s insatiable hunger for ease, for swiftness, now rushes headlong into destruction of that slowness which allows beauty to breathe.
