the patron saint of the sticks

When we look at pictures of others, we may sense things in them that aren’t visibly present, such as the person’s mood or the encompassing cultural scene. That photograph of Michel Gallimard’s sports car smashed into a tree, seemingly split in two, feels like an archetypal image of the car crash itself, the extravagant violence of the wreckage emblematic of the spectacular death of a literary playboy.
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In a passage near the end of The First Man, Camus describes the way that he, as a boy, could distinguish “with his eyes closed” the scent of books released by different publishers: “Each book […] had a specific smell, according to the paper on which it was printed, so singular, and secret.” My edition of The First Man conjures up no smell to my memory, but thinking back on that old copy, still tucked away in my library back home, I do recall a fanciful, impossible, daydream image: pages of the manuscript, those photographic reproductions on the endpapers, splattered with blood.

Here.