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May 12 - October 14, 2017
our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind,
what brings men together is not a community of views but a consanguinity of minds.
verities pertaining to a world more real than that in which I lived,
everyone feels himself to be the centre of the theatre;
and success—which doesn’t always come only to the pushers and the muddlers, the fusspots who are generally show-offs—
Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.
her laughter, out of harmony with her words, seemed, as music seems, to be tracing an invisible surface on another plane.
Life is strewn with these miracles for which people who love can always hope.
Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape in the memory, and, with regard to works we have heard more than once, we are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and finds that he can repeat it by heart next morning.
in such perfect coincidences as this, when reality folds back and overlays what we have long dreamed of, it completely hides it from us, merges with it, like two equal superimposed figures which appear to be one, whereas, to give our happiness its full meaning, we would rather preserve for all those separate points of our desire, at the very moment in which we succeed in touching them—and to be quite certain that it is indeed they—the distinction of being intangible.
there is nothing that so alters the material qualities of the voice as the presence of thought behind what is being said: the
The true variety is in this abundance of real and unexpected elements,
prousts view on a good authors ticks
for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.
that light issues from so profound a depth that its rays do not penetrate to our spoken words in the hours in which, thrown open to others by the act of conversation, we are to a certain extent closed to ourselves.
But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them.
genius consisting in reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.
the goft of n artist consists kof.trnsposing the truth raftherthanexhibiting it
a chiseller of trifles,
is proust tlking about himself here?
he no longer felt himself obliged to perform certain practical duties, for which he had substituted the duty of imagining those other lives.
oh boy!
powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it.
the invisible sculptor whose chisel repeats its work upon successive generations—
indeed there exists but a single intelligence of which everyone is a co-tenant, an intelligence towards which each of us from out of his own separate body turns his eyes, as in a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage.
a stage - the truth!
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire
contract it; and habit fills up what remains.
because, however much we may love the poison that is destroying us, when necessity has deprived us of it for some time past, we cannot help attaching a certain value to the peace of mind which we had ceased to know, to the absence of emotion and suffering.
those who suffer through love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.
our requirements are begotten of our satisfactions, an irreducible quantity.
And as the average span of life, the relative longevity of our memories of poetical sensations is much greater than that of our memories of what the heart has suffered,
That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again.
amazing
In the broad daylight of our habitual memory the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of
applied to her face, which was blurred in the twilight, the mask of my most impassioned dreams, but read in her eyes as they turned towards me the horror of my own nonentity.
It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us.
that vast, dazzling, mountainous amphitheatre, and at the snowy crests of its emerald waves, here and there polished and translucent, which with a placid violence and a leonine frown, to which the sun added a faceless smile, allowed their crumbling slopes to topple down at last.
description of the beach
one of those “intellectuals” easily moved to admiration, who shut themselves up in a book and are interested only in the higher thought.
hah!
For naturalness—doubtless because through the artifice of man it allows a feeling of nature to permeate—
nice
We fear more than the loss of anything else the disappearance of possessions that have remained outside ourselves, because our hearts have not taken possession of them.
that it is not by questioning him that one learns the truth of what another man has had in his mind, and that the risk of a misunderstanding which will probably pass unobserved is less than that which may come from a purblind insistence:
the greatest folly of all is to mock or to condemn in others what one does not happen to feel oneself. I love the night, and you tell me that you dread it. I
world of approximations, where people salute in a void and criticise in error,
nice
That is the intellectual meaning. But the emotional meaning is indeed, “I have no wish to know him.” The speaker knows that it is not true, but he does not, all the same, say it simply to deceive; he says it because it is what he feels, and that is sufficient to bridge the gulf, that is to say to make him happy. Self-centredness thus enabling every human
intellectual meaning vs emotional meaning
they were all brimming over with the exuberance that youth so urgently needs to expend that even when it is unhappy or unwell, obedient rather to the necessities of age than to the mood of the day,
on youth
that it is the dark shadows, unknown to us, of the ideas that that person cherishes about the people and places she knows—the turf of racecourses, the sand of cycling tracks over which, pedalling on past fields and woods, she would have drawn me after her, that little peri, more seductive to me than she of the Persian paradise—the shadows, too, of the home to which she will presently return, of the plans that she is forming or that others have formed for her; and above all that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies, her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will.
th ejoys of first looks
Certainly it would not have been the first of its kind that I had renounced. I had only to recall the numberless strangers whom, even at Balbec, the carriage bowling away from them at full speed had forced me for ever to abandon.
ah the feeling of wanting to know the stories of strangerz you see on the road!
We need imagination, awakened by the uncertainty of being unable to attain its object, to create a goal which hides the other goal from us, and by substituting for sensual pleasures the idea of penetrating another life, prevents us from recognising that pleasure, from tasting its true savour, from restricting it to its own range.
I was sick with despair at the thought of being unable to sample, in unique conditions which left no room for any possibility of error, all that is most mysterious in the beauty which we desire, and which we console ourselves for never possessing by demanding pleasure—as Swann had always refused to do before Odette’s day—from women whom we have not desired, so that we die without ever having known what that other pleasure was. It might well be, of course, that it was not in reality an unknown pleasure, that on close inspection its mystery would dissolve, that it was no more than a projection,
...more
FOMO?
Gradually, as the season advanced, the picture that I found there in my window changed.
same rooom diff time
was no longer in a sufficiently calm or disinterested state of mind to receive any really profound impression of beauty.
ethereal pleasure-dome superimposed upon the other and more intoxicating still.
descriptions of parties and youth
my past no longer projected before me that shadow of itself which we call our future;
When the successive hours of our lives unfold as though on too widely disparate planes, we find that we give away too much of ourselves to all sorts of people who next day will not interest us in the least.
ha!
plunged into that deep slumber in which vistas are opened to us of a return to childhood, the recapture of past years, and forgotten feelings, of disincarnation, the transmigration of souls, the evoking of the dead, the illusions of madness, retrogression towards the most elementary of the natural kingdoms (for we say that we often see animals in our dreams,
wat dreams are made of
